scholarly journals Play and the Profane

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massa Lemu
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Concrete Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The One ◽  
King James Version

In his performances, artist Samson Kambalu takes over, upturns, and redeploys the signs of power to refashion the self. These self-refashioning acts are particularly marked in Kambalu’s performance titled Holy Balls (2000), which involves kicking footballs which were created by plastering Malawian rag and plastic street soccer balls with pages of the King James Version of the Bible; his quasi-spiritualism of Holyballism, which is a doctrinal syncretic mixture of Gule Wamkulu philosophy of the Chewa, the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten’s sun-worshipping monotheism, the creed of Moses the prophet, Jesus Christ, and Nietzsche’s The Gay Science; and the performance-cum-installation (Bookworm) The Fall of Man (2003), featuring a ritual performance in which apples are eaten, surrounded by concrete poetry written on gallery walls. In these artworks, the artist adopts the transgressive performative elements of the Gule Wamkulu masquerade, Duchampian irreverence, and play and the profane to confront his legacy in the form of language, patriarchy, Christianity, and the hegemony of Dr. Kamuzu Banda, founder of the Malawi nation, in processes of subjectification.[1] In this essay, I use Jacques Lacan’s conception of the symbolic father, which constitutes all conventions that bind one to society, Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque subversion of power by the powerless, and Julia Kristeva’s abject and figure of “the deject” as “the one who strays” (as a “deviser of territories, languages, works”) to illuminate how Kambalu takes over and upturns the signs of power, and purges (“exercise and exorcise,” in the artist’s own words) the dark traces of his legacy. In short, with the performances Holy Balls, Holyballism and (Bookworm) The Fall of Man, Kambalu subverts his own religious, cultural, and sociopolitical legacy in order to refashion the self.

God

2019 ◽  
pp. 136-149
Author(s):  
Philip G. Ziegler
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
The Self ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Divine Freedom ◽  
Theology Proper

In the field of theology proper, God’s graciousness is Bonhoeffer’s preoccupying theological concern. Who and what we see when we ‘see the God of the Bible’ is, Bonhoeffer contends, simply God for us. Formally, Bonhoeffer’s theological inquiry is marked by a relentless christological concentration practiced as the discipleship of thought to the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Materially, its central concern is to explicate the reality of divine promeity as the quintessence of the God of the Christian Gospel: God is for us. By taking divine promeity as his primary theme Bonhoeffer makes divine freedom and transcendence important subsidiary concerns, as concepts analytic in the idea of promeity. In Bonhoeffer’s hands, these concepts receive apt, self-consciously evangelical elucidation.

God

2019 ◽  
pp. 212-226
Author(s):  
Katherine Sonderegger
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Doctrine Of God ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Divine Perfections ◽  
The One

Barth’s doctrine of God is revolutionary. It leaves behind many of the traditional elements of a doctrine of God—natural knowledge of God, comparative religious practice, and proofs—and puzzles over simplicity and immutability. In their place Barth installs a new maxim, that God demonstrates or ‘proves’ himself. The Bible is the record of that self-demonstration. The divine perfections emerge in dialectical pairs, each displaying the personal life of God as the ‘One who loves in freedom’. Language for God successfully names God when it speaks of Jesus Christ, the Holy One who exemplifies divine omnipotence, omniscience, grace, mercy, and patience. In this way, Barth carries out his programme of Christological concentration, even in the doctrine of God. This is a doctrine of God unlike any other, an unsettling and a glorious one.

The One Excluded: Hugh Broughton and the King James Version of the Bible

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-396
Author(s):  
Mordechai Feingold
Keyword(s):  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Scholarly Output ◽  
The One ◽  
King James Version

Abstract Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the scholarly character of the King James Version of the Bible than the decision to exclude Hugh Broughton from among its rank of translators. Scholars have generally accounted for this omission by pointing out Broughton’s volatile personality, with some claiming that the integrity of the translation enterprise suffered owing to the exclusion of the eminent Hebraist. This essay offers a more nuanced evaluation of Broughton’s persona and scholarship. Taking his erudition as a given, it seeks to evaluate Broughton’s scholarly output and the route that brought him to advocate a Bible translation against the backdrop of his vehement efforts to defend his writings against critics and his incessant quest for patronage.

Israel among the Nations

1989 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Henri Cazelles
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Social Experiences ◽  
Surrounding World ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The One

The Old Testament reflects the historical, cultural and social experiences of the thousand year period during which it took shape. Ancient Israel borrowed much from the surrounding world and its cultures. These borrowings, however, are consistently subjected to the radical critique enabled by the Bible's peculiar faith in the one God. The Bible is not tied to any particular culture, but it uses cultures both to give expression to the unique religious experience perfected in Jesus Christ and to unite people of all cultures into the one body.

The sovereignty of revelation: On Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of revelation

2021 ◽  
pp. 000842982110448
Author(s):  
Balázs M Mezei
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
The One ◽  
Central Term

In this article I overview Paul Ricœur’s understanding of divine revelation on the basis of some of his relevant writings. I argue that Ricœur’s hermeneutics of revelation has two aspects: on the one hand Ricœur’s explains the complex ways of acquiring and interpreting divine revelation especially with respect to the Bible; on the other hand, he acknowledges that revelation, originating in God’s freedom, is immediately given. In Ricœur’s view, the understanding of this immediacy is tainted by the presence of evil in human understanding which hinders the realization of revelation itself. As a critique of this standpoint I argue that the immediate givenness of revelation is logically and phenomenologically presupposed in our interpretations. Any hermeneutics of revelation entails a phenomenology of revelation. This phenomenology contains both the self-founding of human beings and, at the same time, the recognition of the absoluteness of the divine. Husserl’s phenomenology offers a way to the understanding of the immediacy of revelation through his central term of Eigenheitlichkeit. Ricœur understands this term not as genuine reality but rather as appartenance, ‘belonging to’, and reshapes its meaning in line with a hermeneutical naturalism. This explains his difficulty to conceive properly the sovereignty of revelation and the importance of phenomenology in the understanding of its immediate character.

“The White Whale”

Karl Barth ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 362-382
Author(s):  
Christiane Tietz
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
Doctrine Of Creation ◽  
The One ◽  
The Trinity

Barth’s Church Dogmatics is the most extensive theological work of the twentieth century. Barth worked on it from 1932 until 1967, reconceptualizing theology from the very foundations. He distinguishes three forms of the Word of God, avoiding a biblicistic reading of the Bible. The doctrine of the Trinity is a consequent exposition of the concept of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This God is the one who loves in freedom, that is who relates to human beings because of grace. Barth therefore completely transforms the Reformed doctrine of double predestination. The doctrine of creation as well has to be derived from God’s self-revelation; God created the world because God wanted a covenantal partner. To this creation belong shadow sides as well as nothingness. God in Jesus Christ entered the confrontation with nothingness and reconciled the world with God. Only from reconciliation can we understand the essence of sin.

scholarly journals Wiara kształtowana przez Objawienie. Refleksja nad wiarą jako „adekwatną odpowiedzią”

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-75
Author(s):  
Maciej Małyga
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
The Self ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
The Third ◽  
Adequate Response ◽  
Direct View ◽  
Specific Shape ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church ◽  
Natural Way

Faith is not man’s own project, but his adequate response to Revelation, the personal self-giving of God in history. Because the initiative of Revelation is an absolute condition for the possibil- ity of faith, it gives faith a concrete shape — the specific features of Revelation shape the way faith is formed. The first feature of Revelation is the fact that the Word of God spoke in the human word, that is why faith is not a direct view of the Divine, but it is carried out by reception of what is immanent. The next feature of Revelation is the dialectic of the self-revealing and self-veiling of God. Faith in a natural way is thus stirred with questions, it cannot be manipulated and possessed. The third feature of Revelation, the one that most affects the specific shape of faith, is the fact that it was ultimately accomplished by the Divine Person of the Logos who accepted human nature. Historically becoming the person of Jesus Christ, who is the “universale concretum”, and living in a specific time and space, he embodies in himself the ultimate saving will of God for every human being. The bond with the saving God is accomplished through a bond with Jesus Christ, present today in his Body, which is the Church.

Stories and the Self

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Krause ◽  
Markus Appel
Keyword(s):  
Meta Analysis ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Lower Degree ◽  
Contrast Effects ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Self Perceptions ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Implicit And Explicit

Abstract. Two experiments examined the influence of stories on recipients’ self-perceptions. Extending prior theory and research, our focus was on assimilation effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in line with a protagonist’s traits) as well as on contrast effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in contrast to a protagonist’s traits). In Experiment 1 ( N = 113), implicit and explicit conscientiousness were assessed after participants read a story about either a diligent or a negligent student. Moderation analyses showed that highly transported participants and participants with lower counterarguing scores assimilate the depicted traits of a story protagonist, as indicated by explicit, self-reported conscientiousness ratings. Participants, who were more critical toward a story (i.e., higher counterarguing) and with a lower degree of transportation, showed contrast effects. In Experiment 2 ( N = 103), we manipulated transportation and counterarguing, but we could not identify an effect on participants’ self-ascribed level of conscientiousness. A mini meta-analysis across both experiments revealed significant positive overall associations between transportation and counterarguing on the one hand and story-consistent self-reported conscientiousness on the other hand.

„Rzymski” Żyd – nieznana twórczość Romana Brandstaettera

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Dariusz Konrad Sikorski
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Role Model ◽  
The Self ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Law

Summary After 1946, ie. after embracing Christianity, Roman Brandstaetter would often point to the Biblical Jonah as a role model for both his life and his artistic endeavour. In the interwar period, when he was a columnist of Nowy Głos, a New York Polish-Jewish periodical, he used the penname Romanus. The ‘Roman’ Jew appears to have treated his columns as a form of an artistic and civic ‘investigation’ into scandalous cases of breaking the law, destruction of cultural values and violation of social norms. Although it his was hardly ‘a new voice’ with the potential to change the course of history, he did become an intransigent defender of free speech. Brought up on the Bible and the best traditions of Polish literature and culture, Brandstaetter, the self-appointed disciple of Adam Mickiewicz, could not but stand up to the challenge of anti-Semitic aggression.

Divine Words, Female Voices

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerusha Tanner Lamptey
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Feminist Theology ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Women Scholars ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Divine Words ◽  
Vital Resource

Interreligious feminist engagement is a legitimate and vital resource for Muslim women scholars seeking to articulate egalitarian interpretations of Islamic traditions and practices. Acknowledging very real challenges within interreligious feminist engagement, Divine Words, Female Voices: Muslima Explorations in Comparative Feminist Theology uses the method of comparative feminist theology to skillfully navigate these challenges, avoid impositions of absolute similarity, and propose new, constructive insights in Muslima theology. Divine Words, Female Voices reorients the comparative theological conversation around the two “Divine Words,” around the Qur’an and Jesus Christ, rather than Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ, or the Qur’an and the Bible. Building on this analogical foundation, it engages diverse Muslim and Christian feminist, womanist, and mujerista voices on a variety of central theological themes. Divine Words, Female Voices explores intersections, discontinuities, and resultant insights that arise in relation to divine revelation; textual hermeneutics of the hadith and Bible; Prophet Muhammad and Mary as feminist exemplars; theological anthropology and freedom; and ritual prayer, tradition, and change.

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