Epilogue: Resurrection and Zombies

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-190
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil

This chapter examines the current pop culture fascination with the undead body visible in the explosion of TV shows and films about zombies. Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom tells the story of the well-known French writer’s brief but intense conversion to Christianity, in the grip of which he was involved in developing the French TV series Les Revenants, which was the model for A&E’s The Returned. Carrère’s account of his relationship to the Christian theology of resurrection as an inspiration for Les Revenants reveals the truth of the “undead” genres more generally, namely as a culture-wide return of the repressed, a protest against the increasingly disembodied, virtualized way we live today. Implicitly, the undead character (including the zombie) attacks the modern fantasy that the self is, in its essence, disembodied and therefore reducible to information, data, and code and in which people yearn for a cybernetic resurrection that will take the form of entering into the disembodied life of the digital world. In the midst of this disembodied virtualized world, pop zombie culture, like seventeenth-century culture, is a reminder of the body’s abiding vulnerabilities, limitations, and also potentials for transcendence.

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-31
Author(s):  
Poorva Mathur

Binge watching culture can be much defined with the growing up craze of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. As per a study, streaming services have now more subscribers than traditional pay Television services. “Netflix and Chill”; propaganda have more viewers cast nowadays. Netflix is the biggest player of binge watching in the market for streaming shows online. In early days when Netflix just started back in 1997, only licensed content was used to stream but with the due course of time; Netflix came up with its Originals to heat up the binge. Undoubtedly, Netflix is the game changer and biggest king of the industry. Even the biggest competitors of Netflix like Amazon Prime doesn’t even comes approximal in the overall race. What strikes up the mind over here is ‘whether Netflix subscription by its viewers is because of its licensed content or Originals’? To our great astonishment, 7Park Data analytics platform showcases that only 20% of viewing is going around in Originals but a colossal of 80% share of viewers are in licensed content area. Out of which 18% Originals dominant range lies in U.S. With the time encompassment; most in vogue Originals were Stranger Things Season 1, 13 Reasons Why, Orange is the New Black Season 5, etc; In collation to the most popular licensed titles like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Supernatural, etc. According to a recent study by The Economics Times, India; ever since the launch of Reliance Jio in 2016; top three mobile applications out of 10 downloaded were of video streaming which offers capacious assortment of content upon movies, TV shows and web series. Additionally, main top two apps as of now are Netflix and Tinder due to extended obsession of pop culture of TV Shows, Movies and Online Dating.


Author(s):  
Craig Muldrew

Muldrew traces the integration of Aristotelian into Christian thinking about happiness, by Thomas Aquinas and during the Renaissance but more particularly in the thinking of late seventeenth-century ‘Latitudinarian’ divines. He argues that they were seeking an alternative way to achieve peace and tranquillity to that offered by Hobbes, who had stressed the need for strong authority. Their alternative drew on a variety of classical ideas about self-cultivation and self-discipline, but built upon and further developed relatively hedonistic versions of these. The pursuit of moderate sensual gratification was legitimized as an appropriate use of human faculties implanted by God. Although this was an erudite tradition, it was presented to a less erudite audience in sermons: these writers often transposed ideas from a classical to an English-language setting. In that context, the word ‘happiness’ came to loom large, appearing frequently and functioning as a key motif in latitudinarian thought.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-88
Author(s):  
Robert Farrugia

Michel Henry radicalises phenomenology by putting forward the idea of a double manifestation: the “Truth of Life” and “truth of the world.” For Henry, the world turns out to be empty of Life. To find its essence, the self must dive completely inward, away from the exterior movements of intentionality. Hence, Life, or God, for Henry, lies in non‑intentional, immanent self-experience, which is felt and yet remains invisible, in an absolutist sense, as an a priori condition of all conscious experience. In Christian theology, the doctrine of the Trinity illuminates the distinction between the immanent Trinity (God’s self‑relation) and the economic workings of the Trinity (God‑world relation). However, the mystery of God’s inmost being and the economy of salvation are here understood as inseparable. In light of this, the paper aims to: 1) elucidate the significance of Henry’s engagement with the phenomenological tradition and his proposal of a phenomenology of Life which advocates an immanent auto‑affection, radically separate from the ek‑static nature of intentionality, and 2) confront the division between Life and world in Henry’s Christian phenomenology and its discordancy with the doctrine of the Trinity, as the latter attests to the harmonious unity that subsists between inner life and the world.


Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantinos Constantinou ◽  
Zenonas Tziarras

This article examines the ways in which (pop or) popular culture may fall within the context of foreign policy. More specifically, it situates our analysis against such backdrop by delving into how Turkey effectively exports pop culture, propaganda and positive images of itself via the use of television (TV) shows. To that end, notable Turkish soap operas market its ancient glorious past. Admittedly, these telenovelas form a salient cultural product export for Turkey as they reach diverse and far-away audiences – from Latin America to Russia, Central Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans, to merely name a few. Paradoxically, the frenzy has even reached places like Greece. Not to mention, Serbia or Israel, with the latter’s phenomenal success accompanied also with some backlash. Therefore, the current study seeks to better understand the magnitude alongside the impact of Turkey’s achievement given how it comprises a multi-million-dollar industry, by partially unearthing what makes Turkish TV series so powerful the world over. Further, this research firstly presents an analysis of the hegemonic efforts before presenting the limitations to its success by thoroughly covering the empirical data while, theoretically framing it.  


2021 ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
John Parker

This chapter recounts the broader Akan world's or Asante's human sacrifice. It notes that the practice, as established by Law, was widespread in those parts of the West African coastal and forest zones largely untouched by Islam, both in powerful states such Benin, Dahomey and Asante and among non-centralized peoples such as the Igbo in present-day southeastern Nigeria. The chapter presents evidence suggesting that human sacrifice may well have increased in magnitude in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, as increasing levels of militarization and accumulation generated new forms of violence, predation and consumption. The earliest evidence for human sacrifice in the region, however, came from the Gold Coast itself, where, as elsewhere in West Africa, it was identified as an integral part of mortuary customs for the wealthy and powerful. The chapter then shows seventeenth-century accounts about the slaves who composed the majority of those immolated at royal funerals. It also explores how the self-sacrifice of certain individuals served on the early Akan states.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham

Ushering the reader into both the world of early modern radical religion and the considerable body of scholarly literature devoted to its study, the introduction offers a précis of what is to come and a backward glance to explain how the proposed journey contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations. After orienting readers to the basic methodological boundaries within which the book will operate and briefly situating the book within the wider historiography, the introduction adumbrates the shape of the work as a whole and encapsulates its central argument. The introduction contends that the mid-seventeenth-century men and women often described as “Particular Baptists” would not have readily understood themselves as such. This tension between the self-identity of the early modern actors and the identity imposed upon them by future scholars has significant implications for how we understand both radical religion during the English Revolution and the period more broadly.


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