Theoretical Riffs on the Blues

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-76
Author(s):  
Vincent Colapietro ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Extended Family ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
The World ◽  
Cornel West ◽  
Practices Of Freedom

After disambiguating the word, the author explores the blues primarily not as a genre of music but as a sensibility or orientation toward the world. In doing so, he is taking seriously suggestions made by a host of writers, most notably, Ralph Waldo Ellison, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, and Cornel West. As such, the focus is on the blues as an extended family of somatic practices bearing upon expression (or articulation). At the center of these practices, there is in the blues (to modify Foucault’s words) always the patient yet exuberant work of giving articulate form to our impatience for human freedom. But here the distinction between practices of emancipation, by which a people throws off their political domination, and practices of freedom, by which they tirelessly work to make their freed self truly their own, is crucial. In this, the author is guided by an insight provided by Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (1987: 95). As “an art of ambiguity”, the blues turns out to be also an art of ambivalence: the task of claiming ownership of one’s freed self is one demanding, not only learning to live with irreducible ambiguity but also working toward “an achievement of ambivalence”.

Religiusitas Tokoh-Tokoh Dalam Novel Bumi Cinta Karya Habiburrahman El-Shirazy

AKADEMIKA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-221
Author(s):  
Minahul Mubin
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Religious Values ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
The World ◽  
Religious Aspects ◽  
Religious Elements

A novel titled BumiCinta written by Habiburrahman El-Shirazy takes place in the Russian setting, in which Russia is a country that adopts freedom. Russia with various religions embraced by its people has called for the importance of human freedom. Free sex in Russia is commonplace among its young people. Russia is a country that is free with no rules, no wonder if there have been many not embracing certain religion. In fact, according to data Russia is a country accessing the largest porn sites in the world. Habiburrahman in his Bumi Cinta reveals some religious aspects. He incorporates the concept of religion with social conflicts in Russia. Therefore, the writer reveals two fundamental issues, namely: 1. What is the characters' religiosity in the Habiburrahman El-Shirazy'sBumiCinta? 2. What is the characters' religiosity in the BumiCinta in their relationship with God, fellow human beings, and nature ?. To achieve the objectives, the writer uses the religious literary criticism based on the Qur'an and Hadith. It emphasizes religious values in literature. The writer also uses the arguments of scholars and schools of thought to strengthen this paper. This theory is then used to seek the elements of religiousity in the Habiburrahman El-Shirazy'sBumiCinta. In this novel, the writer explains there are strong religious elements and religious effects of its characters, especially the belief in God, faith and piety

Women in the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerusha Tanner Lamptey
Keyword(s):  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Systemic Transformation ◽  
The World ◽  
Feminist Perspectives

This chapter focuses on theological anthropology and probes the extent and reality of human freedom, especially considering structural and systemic constraint. It begins by exploring existing formulations of egalitarian anthropology that foreground tawhid, fitra, khilafah, and taqwa. It then engages Christian womanist and feminist perspectives on theological anthropology, embodiment, constraint, and survival articulated by M. Shawn Copeland, Jeannine Hill Fletcher, and Delores S. Williams. These perspectives prompt important considerations of individual autonomy and systemic injustice, and of possible responses to such injustice. The chapter concludes by articulating a Muslima theological expansion of taqwa—transformative taqwa—that centers Hajar and stresses systemic transformation through visibilization, conscientization, and prioritization of the marginalized.

II. The Question of God in the Struggle for Racial Justice

Horizons ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 172-194
Author(s):  
Christopher Pramuk
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face

In March 1943, having narrowly escaped Europe three years earlier, Abraham Joshua Heschel published “The Meaning of This War,” his first essay in an American publication. The essay shows, quite remarkably, his full command of literary English. It also shows, as biographer Edward Kaplan remarks, that Heschel “had found his militant voice.” “Emblazoned over the gates of the world in which we live,” the essay begins, “is the escutcheon of the demons. The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. There have never been so much guilt and distress, agony and terror. At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood.” Heschel's extraordinary life's witness, his whole body of work, traverses precisely this anthropological and theological knife's edge: The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. Where is God? Or better, Who is God? in relation to the rapacious misuse and idolatrous distortion of human freedom? Or simply, Is God?

Across the Western Sea (1783-1845)

1962 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kraus
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Native Land ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

In ancient Greece the priests of Apollo asserted that freedom of movement was one of the essentials of human freedom. Many hundreds of years later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, people in the Atlantic world again talked of emigration as one of man's natural rights. It was in northern and western Europe that easier mobility was first achieved within the various states. The next step was to use that mobility to leap local boundaries to reach the lands across the western sea. From the “unsettlement of Europe” (Lewis Mumford's phrase) came the settlement of America.Americans and those who wished to become Americans felt at home in the geographical realm conceived by Oscar Wilde. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” he said, “is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” It was the belief that Utopias were being realized in America that caused millions to leave Europe for homes overseas.IA Scottish observer, Alexander Irvine, inquiring into the causes and effects of emigration from his native land (1802), remarked that there were “few emigrations from despotic countries,” as “their inhabitants bore their chains in tranquility”; “despotism has made them afraid to think.” Nevertheless, though proud of the freedom his countrymen enjoyed, Irvine was critical of their irrational expectations in setting forth to America. There were few individuals or none in the Highlands, he said, “who have not some expectation of being some time great or affluent.

Sissy Insurgencies

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlon B. Ross
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Physical Manifestation

In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.

The International Defense of Liberty

1985 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
Baruch A. Brody
Keyword(s):  
Use Of Force ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right

It seems to me that those who place great value on the right to human freedom can be badly divided on the question of the use of force by states to defend the liberties of those who are not citizens of that particular state. Concerned about the liberties to be defended, they might be enthusiastic supporters of the use of such force by liberty-loving countries throughout the world. Concerned about the liberties that might be violated when the state marshals its forces for use internationally, they might adopt a more isolationist approach to this issue. This paper is an attempt to help clarify this conflict by looking at some of the philosophical issues it raises. Because I wish to avoid factual debates about current conflicts, I will give no real-life examples. However, they are on my mind, and I hope the reader will keep them in mind as well.

The Word Refreshed

2021 ◽  
pp. 358-374
Author(s):  
Jeremy Begbie
Keyword(s):  
Physical Environment ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
New Creation ◽  
The World ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Theological Language ◽  
The Way

This chapter takes its cue from the vision of music adumbrated by the previous three essayists: in which music is seen as depending on a ‘faith in an order of things that exceeds the logic of statement and counterstatement’, arising from an embodied dwelling in the world which is pre-conceptual, pre-theoretical. As such, music has the capacity to free us from the kind of alienating relation to our physical environment that an over-dependence on instrumental language brings, and free us for a more fruitful indwelling of it that has been largely lost to modernity. This resonates with broadly biblical-theological view of humanity’s intended relation to the cosmos, as exemplified in the concept of New Creation in Christ. This essay returns to language, considered in this light: how can music, and thinking about music, enrich language? Specifically, how might music facilitate a deeper understanding of the way ‘God-talk’ operates? It is argued that music can offer a powerful witness to the impossibility (and danger) of imagining we can grasp or circumscribe the divine (the antithesis of human freedom). More positively, it can greatly enrich our use (and understanding) of existing theological language, and generate fresh language that enables a more faithful perception of, and participation in the realities it engages.

Schelling’s Romanticism

2020 ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
Joan Steigerwald
Keyword(s):  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
The Other ◽  
Johann Gottlieb Fichte ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
The World ◽  
Dark Ground

This paper is a contribution to recent scholarly interest in the intersections of post-Kantian idealism and Romanticism. It traces overlapping concerns in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s and Novalis’ works. Both thinkers began their philosophical studies with critical engagements of the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, developing similar arguments for the duplicity of relationships of identity and the problem of their mediation. Novalis and Schelling also explored the intersections of mind and nature through notions of potentiation and depotentiation, stimulated by their respective philosophical examinations of contemporary mathematics and natural sciences. Finally, both thinkers introduced figures of a dark ground or night—Novalis in Hymns to the Night and Schelling in works as diverse as On the World Soul and Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom—to present the unpresentability of the infinite. Although there is little historical documentation of direct borrowings of one thinker from the other, these overlapping concerns are richly suggestive.

A Naturalistic Intrinsic Value Theodicy

2019 ◽  
pp. 236-258
Author(s):  
Scott A. Davison
Keyword(s):  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Survival ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
Intrinsic Values ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe

The theodicy explored in Chapter 13 is naturalistic in the sense that it does not appeal to the existence of good things or events or processes that cannot be studied using the natural sciences. More specifically, unlike most of the theodicies that are typically discussed in the literature, this one does not involve any claims about human survival of death, the existence of a soul, libertarian human freedom, or divine intervention, miraculous or otherwise. The theodicy explored here involves the following claims: Everything that exists is intrinsically valuable to some degree; the universe as a whole is a thing of immense intrinsic value; the immense intrinsic value of the universe as a whole provides God with a justifying reason for creating it; the evil in the world is offset by the intrinsic values of the creatures affected together with the intrinsic value of the world that comes from its regularity.

Setting the Scene

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Welfare System ◽  
Displaced Persons ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
The World ◽  
Economic Depression

This chapter provides a background of the arrival of the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam in the 1850s and how they created out of nothing a Jewish community that quickly became renowned across the world. The former Conversos, including those of the Portuguese community of early modern Amsterdam, have been called the first modern Jews. As New Christians, they gained a reputation for immense wealth, elegance, and aristocratic style that commanded respect in their new domicile. It is less widely known that the new immigrants from the Iberian peninsula also included paupers, or that some of the immigrants or their descendants later became impoverished in Amsterdam. Because of the economic restrictions Amsterdam imposed upon Jews, many were not able to practise their accustomed occupations and as a result were reduced to poverty. Women, single or at the head of a nuclear or extended family, were particularly vulnerable, as were orphans, the infirm, and the aged. Thus, the Portuguese in Amsterdam built up a welfare system that included provision for displaced persons, and especially paupers, belonging to their ‘nation’. However, in the event they had to cope not only with their own compatriots but also with a host of poor migrants from other parts of the contemporary Jewish world, fleeing various combinations of war, persecution, economic depression, and unemployment and lured to Amsterdam by the reputed wealth of the Amsterdam Portuguese.

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