Remembering Lot’s Wife: The Structure of Testimony in the Painted Life of Mary Ward

Sodomscapes ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Keen Interest ◽  
Church Father ◽  
Teaching Ministry ◽  
Opening Up

Chapter three identifies the sodomitical subtext informing a hospitality crisis on a different register, one provoked by the controversial pastoral career of Mary Ward (1585-1645), the early modern “Jesuitress” missionary. The ensemble of commemorative paintings chronicling Ward’s career (the so-called Painted Life) suggestively folds both the scandal and the eschatological resilience of Ward’s public teaching ministry into a forgotten legacy of Lot’s wife. The paintings’ visual testimony achieves this by recapturing second-century church father Irenaeus of Lyons’ intuition of the abandoned woman in Genesis 19 as the spiritually radiant figure of the ecclesial community’s patient dwelling between disaster and redemption. The paintings’ anamorphically transfigured markers of Lot’s wife confirm Erich Auerbach’s cherished hope in the adaptability of figura as a means of maintaining neighborly proximity between past and present in historical realism’s secular grammar. The paintings also anticipate the keen interest that Auerbach’s contemporaries from the progressive ressourcement school of Catholic theology would also develop in deploying figura’s resources as a means of opening up more generous – more hospitable – pathways between Catholicism and modernity.

Panaetius (c.185–c.110 BC)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen A. White
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Roman Imperialism ◽  
Greek Philosopher ◽  
Lasting Influence

Panaetius, a Greek philosopher from Rhodes, brought new vitality to Stoicism in the second century bc by shifting the focus of its ethical theory from the idealized sage to the practical problems of ordinary people. Working a century after Chrysippus had systematized Stoicism, Panaetius is often labelled the founder of ‘Middle Stoicism’ for defending new and generally more moderate positions on several issues. Because none of his writings survive, his influence is hard to gauge precisely and easily underrated. But his impact, especially in Rome where he was closely associated with many in the ruling elite, was profound. His emphasis on public service and the obligations imposed by power and high station probably helped shape the ideology of Roman imperialism. Through Cicero, whose writings preserve many of his ideas, he had lasting influence, especially on early modern moral and political thought.

Heaven and Heavenly Piety in Colonial American Elegies

2009 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 258-267
Author(s):  
Adrian Chastain Weimer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Interesting Part ◽  
Opening Up

When the Massachusetts schoolteacher Benjamin Tompson pictured his unmarried sister Elizabeth in heaven, he saw her in a palace-like ‘nunnerye’ where ‘Chast virgins have faire entertainment free’. Elizabeth and the other virgins in heaven ‘Enjoy their purest love in sacred mirth’ as ‘Great Jesus daily steps of his bright throne/And gives them hart embraces every one.’ Colonial Puritan elegies such as this one challenge our inherited scholarly categories, which contrast a spiritualized Christian heaven with a corporeal Muslim one and set ‘a distant, majestic [Protestant] God’ in opposition to the intimate afterlife of medieval Catholic mystics. The most interesting part about Elizabeth Tompson’s elegy, however, is that she narrates it herself. Benjamin imagined her speaking to him from the bosom of Christ, saying ‘I Dare not tell what hear in heart i find’, and then going on to describe her experience of the afterlife in the first person. Christ leads her to the top of a ‘mount of pleasure’ where, she says, ‘i [have] all [the] flowers of paradice to Crop.’ A Protestant saint embracing a physical Jesus, picking flowers to her heart’s content, and telling her brother about it – these are all images which challenge our notions of early modern views of heaven and demonstrate the fruitfulness of elegies, or funeral poems, for opening up the imaginative worlds of early modern belief.

scholarly journals Transforming curricula into the next century: Doing theology collaboratively with local communities

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanus F. De Beer ◽  
Attie S. Van Niekerk
Keyword(s):  
Public University ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Second Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Transdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Opening Up

The FT at the UP celebrates its first century of existence in 2017. This chapter is an attempt to draw from the emerging approach in both the CCM and the CSC, asking whether it perhaps offers clues for transforming curricula as we enter our second century. The chapter seeks to offer a vision for doing theology collaboratively with communities, in liminal spaces, opening up a transdisciplinary approach to theological engagement. In its engagement with local and struggling contexts, subverting the conventional suburban classroom spaces and hierarchies of knowledge alike, it opens itself up for the ongoing transformation of both theology and the theological curriculum as well as for the transformation of local communities. It presents the possibility of doing theology at a public university in a way that could have direct and hopefully liberating and life-giving impact in a deeply unequal society, mediating multiple households of freedom.

scholarly journals A ‘Chief Error’ of Protestant Soteriology: Sin in the Justified and Early Modern Catholic Theology

Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 41-72
Author(s):  
Matthew T. Gaetano
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Good Works ◽  
The World ◽  
The Catholic Church

AbstractCatholic theologians after Trent saw the Protestant teaching about the remnants of original sin in the justified as one of the ‘chief ’ errors of Protestant soteriology. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Chemnitz, and many Protestant theologians believed that a view of concupiscence as sinful, strictly speaking, did away with any reliance on good works. This conviction also clarified the Christian’s dependence on the imputed righteousness of Christ. Catholic theologians condemned this position as detracting from the work of Christ who takes away the sins of the world. The rejection of this teaching—and the affirmation of Trent’s statement that original sin is taken away and that the justified at baptism is without stain or ‘immaculate’ before God—is essential for understanding Catholic opposition to Protestant soteriology. Two Spanish Dominican Thomists, Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Medina, rejected the Protestant teaching on imputation in part because of its connection with the view on the remnants of original sin in the justified. Adrian and Peter van Walenburch, brothers who served as auxiliary bishops of Cologne in the second half of the seventeenth century, argued that the Protestants of their time now agreed with the Catholic Church on a number of soteriological points. They also drew upon some of their post–Tridentine predecessors to offer a Catholic account of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Nonetheless, the issue of sin in the justified remained a point of serious controversy.

Colleges and their alternatives in the educational strategy of early modern Dutch Catholics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willem Frijhoff
Keyword(s):  
Elementary Education ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Educational Strategies ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Catholic Colleges ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
The Public ◽  
High Level

Like other Catholic communities in Protestant jurisdictions, the Dutch had their own early modern collegial network. The early modern Dutch state is commonly known as a Protestant bulwark from which the Catholics were by and large expelled. However, due to the efforts of the Catholic Reformation and the reluctance of many Dutch to embrace Calvinism in its orthodox variety, Dutch Catholicism managed to survive on a rather large scale, though often with a particular colour marked by lay power and imbued with Jansenism, a rigid variety of Catholic theology rather similar to orthodox Calvinism. Whereas Catholic elementary education continued to be provided in private schools, Catholic colleges and universities, as public institutions, were not allowed in the Dutch Republic. During two centuries Dutch Catholics, at least the militant among them, had to go abroad for their secondary and higher education. Foreign colleges played a major role in their education and intellectual debates: the Dutch colleges of Cologne, Dole, Douai and Rome remained faithful to the Old Church, whereas those of close-by Louvain were the breeding-ground of Jansenism. Significant numbers of Dutch students went to other Catholic universities, at Reims in France, at Pont-à-Mousson in Lorraine, or at different German universities. The Jansenist schism of 1723 led to the creation of the Old Catholic Church with its own college at home, at Amersfoort, tolerated by the Dutch authorities. The scale of the Catholic communities posed a multi-confessional challenge for the Dutch. This was overcome by a high level of official connivance, permitting the tacit creation of Catholic teaching institutions on a private basis, including some small colleges, and the organization of Catholic confraternities at the public universities. Similarly, the Calvinist ‘regents’ mostly closed their eyes to the stream of Catholic students towards foreign colleges in spite of their repeated interdiction by the States-General. This essay will look at four educational strategies adopted by Dutch Catholics to ensure their survival as a confessional community.

Expanding the Canon of Scottish Philosophy: The Case for Adding Lady Mary Shepherd

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-293
Author(s):  
Deborah Boyle
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
External World ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Opening Up

Lady Mary Shepherd (1777–1847) argued for distinctive accounts of causation, perception, and knowledge of an external world and God. However, her work, engaging with Berkeley and Hume but written after Kant, does not fit the standard periodisation of early modern philosophy presupposed by many philosophy courses, textbooks, and conferences. This paper argues that Shepherd should be added to the canon as a Scottish philosopher. The practical reason for doing so is that it would give Shepherd a disciplinary home, opening up additional possibilities for research and teaching. The philosophical reason is that her views share certain features characteristic of canonical Scottish philosophers.

The seventy-two elders of the Letter of Aristeas: An ancient midrash on Numbers 11?

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 175-185
Author(s):  
Noah Hacham
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Greek Translation ◽  
High Priest ◽  
Church Father ◽  
Integral Element ◽  
The Creation

According to the Letter of Aristeas, the ancient treatise on the creation of the Greek translation of the Pentateuch, the high priest Eleazar chose seventy-two elders and dispatched them to Egypt where they translated the Torah into Greek. Scholars discerned the meaning of this number, indicating the affinity to the seventy elders who joined Moses and Aaron in the Sinai covenant (Exod. 24) and the fact that this number represents all the tribes of Israel equally, thus sanctifying the Greek translation in a similar way to the Torah. Particular attention was paid to Epiphanius, the fourth century church father, who explicitly states that the seventy-two elders provide equal representation to all the constituent tribes of Israel. Rabbinic literature, however, has been entirely absent from this discourse. In this article I point to Sifre on Numbers, a second century midrash, that notes that seventy-two elders experienced the Divine revelation (Numbers 11): seventy in the Tabernacle and Eldad and Medad in the camp. I suggest that based on a similar ancient interpretation of Numbers 11, the Letter of Aristeas chose the number seventy-two in order to bestow the aura, authority and sanctity of the seventy-two elders of Number 11 on the Greek translation. This example also highlights Rabbinic literature as an integral element of the cultural context of Jewish-Hellenistic literature.

Early Modern Écologies

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Opening Up

Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship between contemporary ecological thought and early modern French literature. If Descartes spoke of humans as being ‘masters and possessors of Nature’ in the seventeenth century, the writers taken up in this volume arguably demonstrated a more complex and urgent understanding of the human relationship to our shared planet. Opening up a rich archive of literary and non-literary texts produced by Montaigne and his contemporaries, this volume foregrounds not how ecocriticism renews our understanding of a literary corpus, but rather how that corpus causes us to re-think or to nuance contemporary eco-theory. The sparsely bilingual title (an acute accent on écologies) denotes the primary task at hand: to pluralize (i.e. de-Anglophone-ize) the Environmental Humanities. Featuring established and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States, Early Modern Écologies opens up new dialogues between ecotheorists such as Timothy Morton, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour and Montaigne, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and Olivier de Serres.

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