Global actors in Central Asia: Great Game or Great Gain?

From the first days of their independence, the Central Asian states were constantly searching for the most optimal and beneficial ways to interact between each other and with other partners, both located in close proximity to their borders and relatively remote, but no less significant. The main goal and scientific novelty of this research is to analyze current approaches, taking into account the foreign policy doctrines of global actors (Russia, China, the USA and the EU) in relations with the countries of Central Asia. Particular attention is paid to the assessment and conclusions on the prospects for their development, including through the prism of the interests of the states of the region.

Rudolf Bultmann on Rudolf Otto

Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), well known for his book The Idea of the Holy, and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), even more famous for his hermeneutical programs of demythologization and existential interpretation, had, according to Bultmann himself, “been friends at Breslau.” Although Bultmann admitted in 1969 with incorruptible fairness that “the calling of the systematic theologian Rudolf Otto was a great gain for the theological faculty at Marburg,” he also had to state that “Otto and I grew so far apart that our students, too, were aware of the antithesis between his work and mine.” Already ten years earlier, in his first autobiographical draft of 1959, Bultmann mentioned “tensions with R. Otto, Hermann's successor,” which “led to lively discussions” among the students at Marburg. Those tensions date back at least to the early twenties, as two letters of Bultmann to Karl Barth reveal. In the first letter, written at the end of 1922, Bultmann stigmatizes the notes of Otto to F. Schleiermacher's Reden, Über die Religion, as “totally misleading.” In a letter written in April 1927 Bultmann expresses the hope that the opposition at Marburg to the Swiss theologian Eduard Thurneysen might be overcome “in six months, when Otto will be in India.” Thurneysen belonged to the new movement of so-called Dialectical Theology.

Teschemacher and deBillier Cattle Company: A Study of Eastern Capital on the Frontier

Adventure as well as hope for great gain touched off the western cattle boom of the 1880's. The magic lure of the West proved irresistible even to conservative Eastern financiers. Losses were large, but the disillusioned and precipitous withdrawal of capital made them even larger.

Particularism and Peace Augsburg — 1555

Four hundred years have passed since the bells rang out in Germany to announce the Peace of Augsburg. Each century since, historians have piously performed their antiquarian rites in its honor. It was, to be sure, the most important Diet between that of Worms in 1521, when Luther stood alone, and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War which involved many nations. The oratorical monuments erected faithfully on these centennials have generally emphasized the great gain of Protestantism in legal recognition, the assurance, by God's grace, of the freedom of the church, and the honest good of peaceful coexistence. But a sober analysis produces an effect rather more astringent than exhilarating and medicinal than intoxicating.

Art. IX.—The Pallavas

The accumulation of materials for the history of the Pallavas during the last few years has been remarkably rapid and extensive: and those materials are of high quality and great importance. The broad outlines of the history of these old kings during the greater portion of their long political existence are now known fairly well: and we may wait hopefully for a similar discovery of such additional details as are wanted to fill up the open spaces within those outlines. A great gain has thus been obtained for the students of the ancient history of Southern India: the rule of a powerful and enlightened dynasty over a large portion of the Dakhaṇ now fills up a long period of time which until quite recently was supposed to have been occupied by the wanderings of a few half-savage nomads; and a natural position has been thus found in the civilized progress of these kings, for some of the most remarkable works of ancient Indian art, lying as they do within the limits which are now known to have formed the territory of the Pallavas. It is a very remarkable rehabilitation; and all the more so because it was so unexpected: and it is not the less welcome though it has destroyed the old pet theory of the Daṇḍakáraṇya in its numerous shapes and chameleon colourings, which has so persistently claimed to be the key of the ancient history of the Dakhaṇ.