scholarly journals Instead of Introduction: How Old Is Sacredness?

2021 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Tõnno Jonuks ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Folk Religion ◽  
Structural Framework ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Copper Coin

It is customary that references to history are used to legitimise one’s ideological and religious statements. This method is particularly visible in contemporary pagan and spiritual movements, in which history has a crucial position not only in justifications of religious claims but also in searching inspiration for contemporary beliefs and for providing a structural framework for (re)constructing past religions. The commonest explanation for using history in arguments and rhetoric in religion is to add credibility to one’s claims. Examples can be found in traditional institutional religious organisations, in contemporary spiritual movements, but also in the rhetoric of individual charismatic leaders. Such rhetorical manner is not common to contemporary religions only but can also be followed in historical folk religion (see, e.g., Johanson 2018). For instance, in a record of a heavily worn eighteenth-century copper coin, used for healing magic in the early twentieth century, the old age of the coin is specifically valued.

Orphans of the Empire: Lhasa’s Chinese Community from the Qing Era to the Early Twentieth Century

Modern China ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 009770042096992
Author(s):  
Huasha Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Chinese Population ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Academic Assessment ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

This article analyzes the transformation of Lhasa’s Chinese community from the embodiment of an expansionist power in the early eighteenth century to the orphan of a fallen regime after the Qing Empire’s demise in 1911. Throughout the imperial era, this remote Chinese enclave represented Qing authority in Tibet and remained under the metropole’s strong political and social influence. Its members intermarried with the locals and adopted many Tibetan cultural traits. During the years surrounding the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, this community played a significant role in a series of interconnected political and ethnic confrontations that gave birth to the two antagonistic national bodies of Tibet and China. The community’s history and experiences challenge not only the academic assessment that Tibet’s Chinese population had fully assimilated into Tibetan society by the twentieth century but also the widespread image of pre-1951 Lhasa as a harmonious town of peaceful ethnic coexistence.

Sacred Torrents in Modernity: German Jewish Philosophers and the Legacy of Secularization

transversal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Nils Roemer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis article investigates the ongoing interaction between the Jewish sacred past and its modern interpreters. Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Sacred traditions and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition. When the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within the fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist responses. What separated twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem from their nineteenth-century forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical stance toward reason and their crumbling faith in historical progress.

Yokes of Gold and Threads of Silk: Sino-Tibetan competition for authority in early twentieth century Kham

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT RELYEA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indirect Influence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

AbstractBeginning in the early eighteenth century, a bifurcated structure of authority in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet frustrated attempts by both the Lhasa and Beijing governments to assert their unquestioned control over a myriad polities in the borderlands between Sichuan and Tibet. A tenuous accommodation of this structure persisted from the early eighteenth century until the first two decades of the twentieth century when powerful globalizing norms—territoriality and sovereignty—transformed both the understanding and expectations of territorial rule held by Qing and, later, Republican Chinese officials. Absolutist conceptions of these norms prompted an ambitious endeavour to shatter the bifurcated structure and undermine the Dalai Lama's spiritual influence on Kham society. Infrontier imperialism is used to analyse the incomplete implementation of resulting acculturative and incorporative policies, inflected by these two norms, which challenged the monasteries’ indirect influence on the lay rulers of Kham, initiating a struggle for authority that persists to this day.

Marianne Farningham: Work, Leisure, and the Use of Time

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 343-355
Author(s):  
Linda Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Use Of Time ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Long Life ◽  
Looking Back

In 1907, aged seventy and nearing the end of her long life as a journalist and writer, Marianne Farningham published her autobiography. She gave it the forthright title A Working Woman’s Life, thus indicating that in her old age she constructed her identity as that of both ‘woman’ and ‘worker’, closely bound up with her gender as well as with the type of life she had lived. Looking back from the perspective of the early twentieth century, although with a view of life largely shaped in the 1840s and 1850s, she recounted, amongst other things, the joys of her work, the perils of overwork, and the pleasures of relaxation. Her writing accordingly included several passages addressing matters relating to the use and abuse of time.

North America

2021 ◽  
pp. 462-478
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North America ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Academic Study

This chapter assesses the main strands of Edwards’s reception in North America from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Most Americans did not know much, if anything, about Edwards until decades after his death, when various—often conflicting—views of Edwards appeared. New Divinity ministers expanded his theological vison while revivalists, including Charles G. Finney, enlisted Edwards’s legacy for their purposes, and thousands of evangelicals embraced Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd. Edwards intrigued (and offended) writers like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his condemnation of sin caught the interest of antislavery advocates in the Civil War. His legacy helped to shape the rise of American literature as a discipline, leading to the widespread academic study of Edwards that exploded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with over 5000 books, dissertations, articles, and theses published on Edwards.

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