Lord Ram’s Own Sethu: Adam’s Bridge envisaged as an aquapelago

Taking the current geological, environmental and religious controversy around the iconic Adam’s Bridge or Ram Sethu (as it is referred to in Hindu sacred mythography) and the proposed Sethusamudram canal project—which has been delayed since the late-20th century over several administrative terms, due to litigious procedures and protests by religious groups—this paper examines the Ram Sethu as an aquapelago. The Ram Sethu is an aquapelagic zone, not merely in geo-historical terms but also in psychological ways, that is largely experienced in the Indian consciousness through the evolution of ancient folkloric motifs in contemporary media-loric polemic. As an aquapelagic imaginary, or indeed a performed aquapelago, the Ram Sethu is sustained by accumulating epistemic plurality from multiple geological, secularist, sacred and environmentalist interpretations. This epistemological plurality or transcendence of (geo-)logocentric meanings is an inevitable function of aquapelagic imaginaries, even more so of the Ram Sethu, which is reproduced by multiple determinate negations of religion (negating ambitions of economic development), developmentalism (negating themes of environmental sustainability), and environmentalism (negating majoritarian discourses of what constitutes the sacred).

Plague as a means of religious controversy. Continuation

Продолжение перевода памфлета Джорджа Уайтхеда, начало которого опубликовано в N 4 (2020). Предшествующая публикация (Previous publication): Метлицкая З. Ю. Чума как средство религиозной полемики. Российский журнал истории Церкви. 2020;1(4):55-63. doi:10.15829/2686-973X-2020-4-44

«Sei troppo effemminato. / Di femmina son nato». Infrazione di codici e fluidità di genere in alcuni libretti d’opera del Seicento veneziano

The fear that man, subjected to practices considered emasculating, could “regress” to the female state was culturally central in the early modern definition of the man-woman polarity. In this context, effeminacy was used as a stigma against practices to be banned or controlled and was among the main accusations raised by the religious controversy against the emerging professional theatre. Through the close reading of some librettos produced in Venice between 1641 and 1668, the essay aims to show how the authors appropriated some tòpoi of the antitheatrical controversy, building an artistic acrobatics in which love was seen as a “disease” capable of removing the hero’s virility and was observed within a practice (theatre, and especially opera) which was itself considered effeminate and emasculating. The essay revolves around a progressive intensification of ambiguities, transvestitisms and allusions, showing how the librettists of Venetian opera also attempted an investigation of gender codes at the textual level and pushed themselves to the limit beyond which the mechanism of censorship inevitably triggered.

Plague as a means of religious controversy

Translation of a treatise by George Whitehead, a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), criticizing the position of the Church of England during the Great Plague of London, 1665-1666.

A Wagnerian Battle for Souls: Parsifal and the Crisis in American Protestantism, 1882–1904

The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Richard Wagner's Parsifal in December 1903 stirred what was arguably the first American religious controversy over an artistic event to claim national attention in the twentieth century. Although the outcome was predictable – the protests appeared only to fuel box office success – the significance lies in what this controversy reveals about the music drama's most ardent opponents and supporters at a key moment in American religious history. The 1903 Parsifal controversy unfolded in the midst of a crisis in American Protestantism, as conservative establishment Protestants defended their weakening hold on American culture, and their theologically liberal brethren viewed that same culture as both a source of spiritual inspiration and a cause for redemption. Drawing primarily upon accounts published in the New York press, nationally circulated periodicals (including strongly partisan contributions to the debate by The Musical Courier), and the writings of several prominent Protestant clergy and lay leaders, this reception study argues that the religious controversy surrounding the 1903 Parsifal production was a substantive skirmish in this American Protestant crisis, and brought forward competing interpretations of the music drama which highlighted the cultural implications of what had been, until that point, largely a theological dispute. Conservative response fastened onto elements of the drama found to be sacrilegious, while liberal response was conditioned by its kinship to the nineteenth-century phenomenon of Kunstreligion, and a broad view of redemption that extended beyond the individual soul to the artwork and the artist, and to all of culture.