scholarly journals The Holes of an Ordinary Life

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 163-176
Author(s):  
John Moran ◽  

Many modern readers of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina view Anna’s passionate and scandalous romance with Vronsky as tragically heroic insofar as she desires nothing more than true love at any cost. These readers tend to view the story of Levin’s faith journey as inconsequential. This paper argues that such a reading is counter to Tolstoy’s intended message. Tolstoy intended to write a novel about the challenges of Christian faith in nineteenth century Russia. In doing so, he rewrote Paul’s Letter to the Romans in a manner consistent with his own emphasis upon the importance of the natural life—a life which embraces the natural cycle of birth and death and avoids the artificiality of urban, cosmopolitan life.

PMLA ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-282
Author(s):  
David H. Stewart

One of the most impressive features of Anna Karenina is the way in which Tolstoy draws the reader's imagination beyond the literal level of the narrative into generalizations that seem mythical in a manner difficult to articulate. With Dostoevsky or Melville, one sees immediately a propensity for exploiting the symbolic value of things. With Tolstoy, things try, as it were, to resist conversion: they strive to maintain their “thingness” as empirical entities. A character in Dostoevsky is usually only half man; the other half is Christ or Satan. Moby Dick is obviously only half whale; the other half is Evil or some principle of Nature. But Anna Karenina is emphatically Anna Karenina. Like almost all of Tolstoy's characters, she has a proficiency in the husbandry of identity; she jealously hoards her own unique reality, so that it becomes difficult to say of her that she is a “type” of nineteenth-century Russian lady or a “symbol” of modern woman or an “archetypical” Eve or Lilith.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-557
Author(s):  
Rituparna Roy

AbstractA lonely wife in Kolkata and a bachelor in London have a virtual affair, but are forced to re-think their relationship when they discover he is her brother-in-law. Charulata 2011 is an ingenious post-millennial adaptation of Tagore’s novella, Nastanir (The Broken Nest, 1901), already immortalized by Satyajit Ray in his classic Charulata (1964). This intertextuality, especially with Ray, lends an added dimension to the film, allowing Chatterjee to contrast two modernities in Bengal – the colonial and glocal – over the course of a century. Both these women gain temporary respite from their suffocating marriage through an affair, but their circumstances are vastly different. While Tagore/Ray’s heroine (like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley) could only bond with a man she knew, technology expands Charulata’s choice in 2011. She romances the strange and the unknown – an unseen tall dark stranger with a gift for words. While the nineteenth century Bengali heroine had to reign in her erotic impulse, her twenty-first century counterpart submits to it, though with an overwhelming sense of guilt. But there are similarities too – both are childless homemakers; have a literary sensibility; and though a 100 years apart, in both their cases, the lover eventually departs, and duty ultimately wins over passion, bringing back the duly chastened wife to the wronged husband. Charulata 2011 thus dramatizes a glocalized South Asian narrative, where the protagonist negotiates an uneasy juxtaposition of a globalized outlook on the world with the entrapment of age-old social obligations in her self.


Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa

Despite the early loss of his Christian faith, Renan held onto a lifelong belief in the incommensurability of Christianity with Judaism and Islam. This entailed his perception of an unbridgeable chasm between Christianity and the two “Semitic religions.” Such insistence originated in his understanding of Jesus as a unique figure, one who stood at the very core of the world history of religions. It is in his Life of Jesus that he expressed most clearly his views on the founder of Christianity. First published in 1863, Renan’s Vie de Jésus would swiftly become, in the original as well as in its multiple translations, a nineteenth-century international best seller. The chapter reassess the roots of Renan’s project, as well as its impact. Finally, we compare Renan and the Jewish historian Joseph Salvador on the figure of Jesus.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-92
Author(s):  
Joanna Dales

Abstract Many Quakers who reached maturity towards the end of the nineteenth century found that their parents’ religion had lost its connection with reality. New discoveries in science and biblical research called for new approaches to Christian faith. Evangelical beliefs dominant among nineteenth-century Quakers were now found wanting, especially those emphasising the supreme authority of the Bible and doctrines of atonement whereby the wrath of God is appeased through the blood of Christ. Liberal Quakers sought a renewed sense of reality in their faith through recovering the vision of the first Quakers with their sense of the Light of God within each person. They also borrowed from mainstream liberal theology new attitudes to God, nature and service to society. The ensuing Quaker Renaissance found its voice at the Manchester Conference of 1895, and the educational initiatives which followed gave to British Quakerism an active faith fit for the testing reality of the twentieth century.


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah K. Tenai

As an emergent and rapidly growing international field of study, public theology has its focus on how Christian faith and practice impact on ordinary life. Its principle concern is thewell-being of society. In Africa, and in Kenya in particular, where poverty levels are still high, there is a need to enquire into the value and efficacy of the poverty discourses in publictheology, for the calling of the church to respond to poverty. One of the main and fast growingchurches in Kenya, the Africa Inland Church (AIC), has vast resources used for, amongst otherthings, various on-going work amidst the poor and the vulnerable in remote and poor areas. Due to the unrelenting nature of poverty in Kenya, the AIC needs a theological perspective, which is sufficiently sensitive to poverty and can enable it to respond to poverty moreeffectively. Public theology’s emphasis on gaining an entrée into the public square andadopting the agenda of communities, including public theology’s calling on churches toactively participate in rational and plausible public discourses, can assist the AIC to respondeffectively to the challenge of poverty in Kenya.


1962 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Henfer

One of the less encouraging consequences deriving from the revival of traditional modes of theology and church life has been the shadow which has fallen over the great historian-theologians of the nineteenth century. It is said that we have superseded the work of these men. This is no doubt true, but it is not at all clear in what sense we have superseded them, or what the world “supersede” might mean in this judgement. To be sure, the student who turns to these nineteenth century figures today finds that their historical judgements are frequently unreliable by current standards (but less so than we might wish!), and that their biases sometimes narrow their historical vision to an almost intolerable extent. But he also finds in their work a seriousness and an earnestness which did not flinch from the great problems which arise when the Christian faith is subjected to historical science. The student finds that most of the issues which they raised are still relevant, mostly still unsolved.


Author(s):  
William J. Abraham

This chapter discusses the epochal shift in scriptural interpretation in the nineteenth century. Applying historical investigation to accounts of divine inspiration and revelation resulted in a call for a radical reconstruction of Christian theology, especially as developed in liberal Protestantism. There were a number of responses to such reconstruction of Christian faith. One option was to resist the logic of liberal Protestantism’s normative apologetic while retaining an existential appropriation of biblical heroes and narratives. A second option was to develop a whole new apologetic for the traditional position on inspiration and inerrancy. A third option was to shore up the appeal to biblical authority by a theory of development culminating in a doctrine of papal infallibility. Fourth, there was the populist option of focusing on personal piety and working from a deflationary soteriological vision of Scripture. All five options, if we include liberal Protestantism, continue to flourish.


Author(s):  
Donovan O. Schaefer

This chapter examines broad transformations in Christian thought that came to pass over the course of the nineteenth century through exposure to new developments in the life sciences. Taking William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) as a starting point, it shows how a conception of an unchanging God that could be demonstrated through rational proof was affected by the new emphasis on change in the biological sciences, especially in the aftermath of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Rather than suggesting that these new themes weakened Christian faith, however, a close examination of Christian thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century shows that encounters with science energized Christian theology, philosophy, and practice. This trajectory culminated with the development of the psychology of religion, as exhibited by the American pragmatists William James and Charles S. Peirce. George Eliot’s Middlemarch serves as a guide to the complexity of these transformations.


2010 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Richard Fox Young

AbstractUsing the example of Nehemiah Goreh, a mid nineteenth-century Brahmin Hindu convert to Christianity, the essay explores how Anglican missionaries interacted with Indian counterparts, sometimes encouraging their ordination (as was the case in the South), or (as was the case in the North) placing obstacles in their way. After an agonistically 'cognitive' struggle with Christian faith, Goreh was recommended for ordination by the Low-Church Anglican missionaries of Benares, only to be denied 'Holy Orders' by superiors in Calcutta, who felt that ordination would entail social intercourse of a kind detrimental to British status in colonial society. Having been a 'subaltern' of mission for some twenty years, Goreh converted again, this time to High-Church Anglicanism. I demonstrate that he did this not only to secure his ordination (High-Church Anglicans being less averse to having Indian counterparts), but also because, in the process of understanding the faith he had embraced, he had become convinced by High-Church Tractarians of the “Grace of Orders.” I argue, therefore, that Goreh's little-known ordination quest demonstrates exemplary integrity, politically and theologically.


2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Barnard

The reading and study of bibles in Canada has shaped the ways in which the Christian faith is practiced, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that bibles became widely available. This article examines the historical developments of bible distribution in British North America, focusing on the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), which became the largest distributor of bibles in the world. Strengthening the BFBS's Canadian influence was its agent James Thomson, whose work in British North America between 1838 and 1842 expanded the organization’s reach and ensured an ample supply of bibles in the colonies. Through the expansion of local Bible Society auxiliaries and the establishment of distribution networks, Thomson laid the foundations for the BFBS’s success in establishing a successful bible enterprise that would dominate the trade in British North America for the rest of the century.


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