Slavery and Freedom in Christianity

This chapter discusses the use of freedom and slavery in the writings of Paul. Dale Martin starts by outlining what we can say, from the perspective of a critical historian, about the life of Paul. The discussion covers his education, background, and conversion experience. The core of the chapter is about Paul’s use of the language of slavery and freedom. Martin argues that Paul is incorporating into his religious vision many common tropes developed in the Greek democracies. These tropes he would have picked up through his rhetorical education in Greek and used in his letter writing to his churches. The chapter closes by looking at Paul’s vision of freedom, which Martin argues is quite different from a modern individualist, conception of freedom as absolute nonconstraint. Freedom for Paul only exists within a closed system, constrained by the being of god.

A Survey Study of Recent Works on Nasr’s Eco-Religious Thought and Approach (Satu Tinjauan Terhadap Karya-Karya Terbaru Tentang Pemikiran dan Pendekatan Eco-Agama Nasr)

The current paper presents a brief survey study on recent works on Nasr's eco-religious thought and approach. The paper aims to analyse these works critically to focus how and up to what level their discussions can match with Nasr's original understanding. The research methodology is basically literature review with textual analysis. In so doing, the article attempts to enrich the present discussion on Nasr's eco-religious vision. Keywords: Eco-philosophy, Eco-spirituality, Perennial philosophy, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Sacredness of Nature, Sanctity of life. Abstrak Sebahagian cendiakawan berminat mempelajari pemikiran tradisional Seyyed Hossein Nasr mengenai persekitaran. Karya-karya mereka membantu tersebarnya pemikiran eko-agama Nasr secara penghargaan dan juga kritikan. Artikel ini mengkaji karya-karya terbaru mereka mengenai pemikiran dan pendekatan eko-agama Nasr untuk melihat sejauh mana karya-karya ini dapat disesuaikan dengan pemikirannya yang sebenar. Kaedah yang digunakan adalah menerusi tinjauan kajian-kajian lepas dan analisis teks. Artikel ini menyumbang kepada kepelbagaian karya-karya yang sedia ada mengenai pemikiran eko-agama Nasr. Kata Kunci: Eco-filosofi, eco-spiritual, falsafah abadi, Sayed Hossein Nasr, rahsia alam, kesucian hidup.

Agrippa d’Aubigné

Born in 1552, Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné was taken by his father, at the age of eight, to look upon the severed heads of Huguenots executed for their part in the failed Conspiracy of Amboise. The spectacle marked the child, stirring his devotion to the Protestant cause, which determined his whole life. His military career included serving in the first three Wars of Religion under the prince de Condé, and then in the army of Henri of Navarre. When wounded at the battle of Casteljaloux (1576), Aubigné experienced a religious vision, which, he claims, was the first inspiration for his epic poem Les Tragiques, written and revised over some forty years, before its publication in 1616. His best-known work for modern readers—monumental, and by turn dramatic, satirical, and deeply moving—it is above all imbued with his Calvinist faith in the ultimate triumph of divine purpose, despite the horrific scars wrought by the civil wars. Yet Aubigné’s personal relationship with other leading Protestants was often tense. When Henri IV converted to Catholicism in 1593, Aubigné felt bitterly betrayed and retreated for a while to his family and his provincial estates in Poitou, where he penned his Lettre à Madame, urging the king’s sister, Catherine de Bourbon, to hold firm to her Protestant faith. The need to make his voice heard and shape the Protestant cause impelled him, however, to return repeatedly to the political fray, albeit with increasing disappointment. The accession of Louis XIII and the Regency of Marie de’ Medici fueled his anger against those Protestants willing to appease the new regime. Never inclined to hide his views, he indulged his full satirical venom in his novel Les Aventures du baron de Fæneste (1617–1619), while the seditious views voiced in the first two volumes of his Histoire Universelle (1618–1619) saw this work condemned to be burned. In the last decade of his life, Aubigné took refuge in Geneva (1620–1630), where his marriage with Renée Burlamacchi brought companionship and literary support, not least in her role, after his death, of ensuring his many manuscripts were safely transmitted to the pastor Tronchin, his literary executor. Aubigné may appear as intransigent, and easily moved to anger and scorn, but he was also devoted to his family, as shown in his manuscript Sa Vie à ses enfants, and he had a striking regard for women who stood fast for their Protestant faith.

Introduction

Many people believe that if religious parties come to power, they will inevitably proceed to curb the civil liberties of their citizens in order to realize their religious vision, particularly in Muslim-majority countries. Academic research on religious parties, on the other hand, claims that the need to compete in elections always incentivizes religious parties to moderate their behaviors and policies, including those on civil liberties. Neither of these assertions has been systematically tested across all Muslim countries. This book is the first to adjudicate this debate based on systematic data covering all Muslim-majority countries for a period of almost forty years. It highlights the role that religious lobbies play on this issue and identifies the specific conditions under which religious parties do moderate their religious positions and don’t curb civil liberties, and the conditions under which they do so.

How the Visions Genre Correlates in the Protestant and Orthodox Christian Culture of the Nineteenth Century: a Theological and Philosophical Analysis

The increasing interest of the mass audience to various types of fantasy art triggered an interest for the genre of religious vision, a phenomenon of the theological literature of the XIX century. The present research featured a philosophical and theological analysis of the genre of vision in the Western European and Russian religious culture of the XIX century. The research objective was to identify the origins of the genre of vision that arose in the religious culture of the XIX century and to give it a general description. The author compared the visionary experiences of the Protestant author Ellen G. White and an anonymous Orthodox author. The study helped to reveal that people's idea of the existence of the other world is an integral component of the imaginary world that underlies any religion and can be a subject of comprehensive analysis in modern theology and cultural studies. The author used the following research methods to comprehend the spiritual experiences embodied in the genre of visions and recorded in the doctrinal literature of Protestantism and Orthodoxy: the comparative historical method and the textual analysis of visionary texts, theological literature, and ontopsychological studies. The theoretical basis included various works by Russian philosophers, cultural scholars, and theologists, who elevated the visionary literature to the level of meta-scientific synthesis. The scientific novelty of the research is that it compares the spiritual experiences of Protestantism and Orthodoxy. The paper introduces a method that can be used to study other religious confessions in philosophical and religious discourse.

Islam and the Creative Imagination in Senegal

In few other places in the creative traditions of sub-Saharan Africa isthe factor of Islam more prominent and influential than in Senegal.Manifested on the level of form and subject-matter and spanning a widecross-section of talent in both the traditional and modern media ofcreative expression, this prominence and influence can be attributed toanumber of factors ranging from the artistic maturity, religioussensibility, intellectual astuteness and ideological orientation ofindividual artists to the more general impact that Islam, as a dominantreligious force, is perceived to have had on secular life in Senegal. Thesefactors, to a large extent, determine the various ways in which individualSenegalese artists define themselves and their art vis-a-vis Islam, inparticular, and society, in general, definitions which creatively translateinto formal choice, thematic focus and, to use a cliche, “message”.Two opposite sets of equally militant attitudes constitute the polarextremes that bracket the range of Senegalese artists’ creative responseto Islam, thus paralleling or ‘reflecting’ similar patterns that obtain inthe society at large. This is hardly surprising, given the conception thatSenegalese, and indeed, most African artists, have of the nature andfunction of art in society. On one pole is that ensemble of attitudes shapedby a zealous embrace and vigorous advocacy of the primordiality ofIslam as the most, indeed, the only, legitimate and effective vehicle forthe totalization of the individual and the society. Art in the hands ofindividuals on this end of the creative spectrum becomes an instrumentof propagation of religious ideals, in this case Islamic religious ideals.But beyond this religious vision or in conjunction with it, cultural and ...

The Paradoxes of Quo vadis

Both the manner in which Sienkiewicz constructed his vision of ancient Rome and the way it affected contemporary readers appear paradoxical. This chapter presents four examples of these contradictions. The topographical vision of the Eternal City constructed in the novel reflects the perception of a pilgrim tourist visiting it in the late nineteenth century; nevertheless that vision restored the sense of connection held by native Italians with the tradition of Urbs Roma. The characters endowed in the novel with the greatest freedom of movement belong to Sienkiewicz’s world rather than to classical antiquity. As for the historical characters, they are passive and essentially form part of the novel’s mock-up of Neronian Rome. The book turned out to be very attractive to European readers, giving them an impression of genuine contact with their Roman heritage. Yet this effect was achieved by an author who drew upon the tradition of a Latinity imported into Poland and who, in addition, gave a central place to the motif of a Slavic martyr evangelizing her Roman oppressors. Readers who were completely unaware of the slogan ‘Poland, the Christ of Nations’, and understood nothing of the book’s patriotic codes, could nonetheless feel the authenticity of the author’s experience of something that can be called a ‘totalitarian system’. In this way, thanks to a Polish writer, European readers were given a vivid and impressive vision of Nero’s time, told from the point of view of the weak and oppressed. It was a historical and religious vision that seemed more believable than anything the writers of the West could offer them.

Near Eastern Practice of Law in Deuteronomy

This chapter examines the implications of documentary evidence on Near Eastern legal practice for understanding legal material in the biblical book of Deuteronomy. The chapter extends to Deuteronomy B. Wells’s approach to biblical law by observing similar legal issues, similar legal reasoning, and similar legal remedies shared by the Deuteronomic Code and cuneiform records of ancient Near Eastern legal practice. These data suggest that Deuteronomy was produced by scribes who were directly familiar with legal practice or who utilized textual traditions in turn directly rooted in legal practice. Deuteronomy presents legal practice in a systematic way, probing its underlying principles. At the same time, the data examined here also suggest that the Deuteronomic Code was not merely descriptive of legal practice. For example, in the law about fugitives, the Deuteronomic Code presents a vision of Israel’s international status that did not precisely match historical reality. As a literary work, Deuteronomy embodied a political and religious vision of Israel, including its legal system.