Shades of Grace: The Virgin of the Rocks and Leonardo da Vinci’s Notes on Paragone

This essay analyses Leonardo da Vinci’s innovative iconography in the making of the panel known as the Virgin of the Rocks (Paris, Louvre) in relation to his considerations on the important Renaissance debate of Paragone, or comparison among the arts, namely, Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Poetry. It will be argued that this work, as a depiction of a complex religious theme, may be interpreted as a laboratory for Paragone-related demonstrations, especially in regards to five points: the optical tangibility of the image; the temporalities involved in the representation; the variety of subjects; and, finally, its iconic stability and semiotic openness as vehicles to further stimulate the devotional value of the painting.

The semantics of religious images in the art of the renaissance

Purpose of research is to consider the culture and art of the Renaissance and explore the semantics of religious images of the outlined period. Methodology. The tasks posed in this work led to the use of the following research methods, namely: analysis and synthesis, generalization and systematization of theoretical material, comparison and generalization of the result obtained in the process of studying theoretical material and specialized publications covering this issue. The solution of the tasks was achieved by applying the comparative historical, descriptive, logical and systemic methods. Scientific Novelty. The semantics of biblical images in the works of Renaissance artists are revealed. Conclusions. In the Renaissance, a completely new self-consciousness of a person is formed, among spiritual values, preference is given to the nobility and personal merits of the person. The meaning of life is not laid in the salvation of the soul, but in creativity, self-knowledge, serving humanity, society and not God. God, giving man free will, gave him the right to create his own destiny and determine his place in the world. Since the church of that time still had great power, the basic ideas of artists of that time were embodied in works with a religious theme, but in their painting, there were existing contradictions between the humanistic, deep life content ant traditional religious subjects. The works of the renaissance conveyed the being of the person around whom the biblical painting took place, all this was on one plane.

Contextual Content of Friday Sermons in the Religious Moderation Discourse in Jayapura City

The study of Friday sermon content is always interesting to discuss, especially in Muslim minority areas. This study describes the content of the Friday sermons selected by the preachers in Jayapura City. The research method used is a qualitative method by recording Friday sermons from several types of mosques, namely the Great Ash Shalihin Mosque in Jayapura City, the Baiturrahim Mosque, Kotaraja, Skyland Complex, and the IAIN Fathul Muluku Jayapura Campus Mosque. This study found that the procedure for selecting khatibs in Jayapura City was coordinated by the Ministry of Religious Affairs except for Heram and Muara Tami Districts. Therefore, content is easier to coordinate. In general, preachers in Jayapura City prefer themes around issues of faith, jurisprudence, and morals. Besides that, the preacher also often chooses content related to events that are currently viral. Meanwhile, content related to religious moderation, including local wisdom, is still very minimal. Khatib tends to choose a religious theme or context that is safe from controversy because in Jayapura the majority is Christian. In addition, the preachers' and community's literacy is still lacking towards moderation material on religion and local wisdom. The control efforts undertaken by the Ministry of Religion over the implementation of the Friday sermon schedule in Jayapura City need to be increased by capturing all mosques. There needs to be a mapping related to the distribution of preachers, da'wah themes, the religious characteristics of community groups as objects of da'wah so that the preaching delivered does not impress provocative da'wah just because it differs in religious understanding.

Introduction

Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. —Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia This book is a meditation on a philosophical and religious theme. In it I explore the problem of secularization, not as a social process, but as a conceptual gesture that appears with some prominence in the writings of three key theorists: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. The fact that all three of these writers were affiliates of the Institute for Social Research, the so-called Frankfurt School of social philosophy and cultural criticism, may encourage the impression that they agreed upon a common doctrine, though in fact their differences were often profound. This is especially clear when we examine their distinctive views on secularization, a topic that surely ranks among the more controversial problems in modern social theory. Philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, and historians continue...

Межъязыковые омонимы в лексико-семантической группе „Религия” (на примере польского и русского языков)

The paper aims to present the types of semantic relations which hold between the interlingual homonyms existing in the semantic field of “people’s spiritual life”. The primary type of the relations among the studied lexical units is exclusion (the presence of a religious component in the semantics of a word of one of the studied languages and the lack of such a component in the other language). Because of the significant number of the examples of this type of relation, the words were divided into three thematic groups: 1) concepts (пассия – pasja), 2) objects (арка – arka), 3) people (лектор – lektor). The relation type of inclusion (with the shared religious semantics, one of the homonyms has an additional meaning related to this area) was observed in a few pairs (катафалк – katafalk). The relation type of overlapping (with the shared religious semantics, each of the homonyms has an additional meaning) in a given lexical field was not identified. No relation of overlapping in a given lexical field and only a few cases of the inclusion relation can prove that the resources of Russian and Polish homonymous words belonging to the religious theme of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches contrast with one another in quite an unobvious way. It is conditioned by both linguistic as well as cultural factors.