MORAL AND LEGAL ASPECTS OF MONASTIC LAND OWNERSHIP IN THE CONSECRATION BY PRINCE-MONK VASSIAN PATRIKEEV

The article analyzes the journalistic activity of the famous Russian medieval publicist, Prince-monk Vassian (Patrikeev). The article presents and analyzes his main arguments against the contemporary practice of monastic farms, which extended the right of ownership to large land plots. Vassian builds his argument against the patrimonial rights of monasteries - religious and theoretical argument (the Gospel commandments), historical argument (examples of ancient saints), and also complements it with canonical arguments, references to the decisions of church councils.

A Legacy of Child Exclusion

Chapter 1 begins with an overview of the historical argument for human rights, starting in the seventeenth century, that stresses human reason and autonomy as the foundation of rights for “abstract adults,” especially in the theories of Locke and Kant. These liberal approaches denied children rights on the grounds that they did not meet the criteria for rights. In contrast, this chapter presents a relational approach to rights based on shared human vulnerability and dependency. Those aspects stress the social, not individualist, nature of rights, as envisioned by Marx, feminists, and communitarian thinkers. The new approach makes inclusion of children’s human rights possible.

Introduction

‘Introduction’ is a wide-ranging theoretical and historical argument for the fundamental importance of the concept of horror to the history of human culture and civilization. Horror is written into our earliest cultural and artistic documents, and our religions and their rituals. There are differences between horror and terror; the Gothic; the uncanny; and the weird that are important when considering horror. Horror is a culturally determined form that suffers from historical anxieties. This can be seen by looking at such as imperialism, nuclear warfare, and climate change.

How Legacies of Geopolitical Trauma Shape Popular Nationalism Today

Geopolitical competition and conflict play a central role in canonical accounts of the emergence of nation-states and national identities. Yet work in this tradition has paid little attention to variation in everyday, popular understandings of nationhood. We propose a macro-historical argument to explain cross-national variation in the types of popular nationalism expressed at the individual level. Our analysis builds on recent advances on the measurement of popular nationalism and a recently introduced geopolitical threat scale (Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017). With the use of latent class analysis and a series of regression models, we show that a turbulent geopolitical past decreases the prevalence of liberal nationalism (pride in institutions, inclusive boundaries) while increasing the prevalence of restrictive nationalism (less pride in institutions, exclusive boundaries) across 43 countries around the world. Additional analyses suggest the long-term development of institutions is a key mediating variable: states with a less traumatic geopolitical history tend to have more established liberal democratic institutions, which in turn foster liberal forms of popular nationalism.

Defining a War: INDOCHINA, THE VIETNAM WAR, AND THE MAYAGUEZ INCIDENT

Only two weeks after the fall of Saigon in May 1975, Khmer Rouge forces seized the American merchant ship SS Mayaguez (1944) off the Cambodian coast, setting up a Marine rescue and recovery battle on the island of Koh Tang. This battle on 12–15 May 1975 was the final U.S. military episode amid the wider Second Indochina War. The term Vietnam War has impeded a proper understanding of the wider war in the American consciousness, leading many to disassociate the Mayaguez incident from the Vietnam War, though they belong within the same historical frame. This article seeks to provide a heretofore unseen historical argument connecting the Mayaguez incident to the wider war and to demonstrate that Mayaguez and Koh Tang veterans are Vietnam veterans, relying on primary sources from the Ford administration, the papers of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, and interviews with veterans.

Empire of Ruins

Empire of Ruins explores the meaning of ruins in American culture, from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, arguing that photographs have been the chief means by which the significance of ruins has been created in American culture. The book traces a historical argument that begins in the nineteenth century, when Americans yearned for the ruins of Europe, then moves to the discovery of Native American ruins in the Southwest. Later chapters explore the visualization of inner city ruins, abandoned factories, and shopping malls, and the “creative destruction” of buildings in order to make way for bigger ones. In addition, it analyzes the imagery of the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster; the ruins of the industrial landscape through mining operations; the ruins created by natural disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy; and the ruins produced by climate change, including the melting of the ice caps. Empire of Ruins considers, in conclusion, the way the picturing of ruins has served to mark revolutionary moments in political culture, symbolizing the choices societies must make. Empire of Ruins focuses mainly on photography, but it encompasses painting, literature, and popular films as well, in order to provide a larger picture of the cultural meaning of ruins. At the same time, it examines the powerful aesthetic attraction of ruin imagery in photographs and films, showing how the Destructive Sublime, a new category of experience, evokes contrary responses in viewers.

Faith and Knowledge: Habermas’ Alternative History of Philosophy1

Jürgen Habermas’ philosophical oeuvre so far contained only few references to thinkers prior to Kant. The publication of a comprehensive history of Western philosophy by this author, therefore, came as a surprise. The book is not, as many had anticipated, a book about religion, but about the gradual emancipation of “secular” “autonomous” rationality from religion, although in a way that preserves a normative commitment to Christianity. While welcoming this attitude and praising the achievements of this book, this text is also critical with regard to Habermas' understanding of faith and hints at several shortcomings of the historical argument resulting from this deficient presupposition.

The Shopping Precinct

This chapter discusses the emergence of the shopping precinct as a distinct urban form in the mid-twentieth century and how it would come to reshape Britain's urban environment. Britons often use the words “shopping precinct,” “shopping center,” and “shopping mall” interchangeably. These terms are used to refer to the hundreds of comprehensively planned developments housing multiple different shops that punctuate British towns and cities in a way that is both banal and familia. The chapter dispenses with the term “shopping center,” and preserves an important distinction between the “shopping precinct” and “shopping mall.” It presents a historical argument about the development of British spaces over the twentieth century. The chapter focuses on the example of Gibson's precinct in Coventry — one of the first and arguably most extravagant of the wave of the postwar shopping precinct. Ultimately, the chapter dwells on the strange historical conditions surrounding the birth of the American shopping mall.

KRITIK ATAS PANDANGAN WILLIAM M. WATT TERHADAP SEJARAH PENULISAN AL-QUR’AN

The study of the Qur'an has been a topic of interest to many circles, excluding Western scholars. Many of the themes they promote are generally related to the authenticity of the Qur'an. To get into this problem, many circles start arguing from the history of the Qur'an. It is this theme that William M. Watt is concerned within studying the Qur'an. Watt begins his narrative by referring to the term Ummi referred to by the Prophet Muhammad. Likewise, arguments about the literary tradition of the community are presented by reference to many verses in the Qur'an. The majority of interpretations produced are in sharp contrast to the views of the majority of Muslim scholars, so this study aims to conduct a review of Watt's views using thematic methods. This study concludes that the Qur'anic verses used as the basis for Watt's argument over the history of Qur'anic writing can be categorized into two types; historical arguments and interpretations. In the model of historical argument, Watt tends to assume that the writing tradition among the Arabs is also owned by the Prophet, so that the word of the people attached to the Prophet is understood as the Prophet's ignorance of the ancient scriptures. To reinforce the historical argument, Watt analyzes several passages relating to the term public for reinterpretation. Watt's steps in explaining the Qur'an's writing history tend to differ from many circles. Some historical arguments using the basis of verse tend to generalize their context, thus influencing many subsequent interpretations. This is why Watt's opinion is different from the opinion of the majority of scholars.