Dostoiévski – Niilismo, Arte e Cristianismo

In this paper, the religious question in Dostoevsky's work will be addressed taking two different aspects into consideration. Firstly, the religious context of Russian Orthodoxy, as well as the space occupied by the Orthodox tradition in the Russian intelligentsia during the 19th century. It is in this context that the thought of Vladimir Soloviev are found. He was the one responsible for the first theological reading of Dostoevsky's works under the point of view of Orthodoxy and for the development of a sophisticated interweaving of religion and aesthetics. Secondly, there is an effort for displacing the author from the theological tradition of Orthodoxy and also an attempt to position Dostoevsky’s religious thought in the outlook of Modern Nihilism. The paper argues that nihilism enables the birth of a religious vocabulary which is not conditioned by the traditional theological principles commonly linked to Dostoevsky’s aesthetic and religious universe. Thus, we understand that it is on the horizon of nihilism and not within the frameworks of a traditional religion that Dostoevsky's Christianity must be interpreted.

Funerals and Religious Modernity in China

Modernity in China has involved the establishment of religion as a separate sphere of life, rapid urbanization, and the rise of the profession of funerary work. This paper examines the intersection of these three trends. On the one hand, the professionalization of funerary work takes place outside of religious institutions. It involves the commercialization of funerary work, the separation of the spaces for funerary ritual from the spaces of everyday life, and the need for professionals in a context where death itself is separated from the dynamics of living. On the other hand, because life itself is sacred and death vividly poses questions of the meaning of life, funerary ritual takes on a sacred tone and religious elements enter the proceedings no matter how nonreligious the professionals and the bereaved claim to be. The dynamics of religious modernity, or “the religious question in China,” involves the simultaneous compartmentalization of religion and the breaking of the boundaries between the religious and the nonreligious. These dynamics are at the heart of contemporary, urban Chinese funerals.

‘A Forming Poem’: Towards a Process Poetics

Even as theopoetics turns to literary structures and grammatology to arbitrate between an Absolute and Absolute meaninglessness, John Caputo and David Miller are careful to separate its project from theopoetry’s representations of God. But this division makes little provision for figures like Denise Levertov, whose work suggests that the religious question is an inherently aesthetic one, that this arbitration can happen through representation. This article reads Levertov’s ‘The Tide’ in order to define a mode of signification unbound to spiritual fixity. Through its characterisation of both form and faith as process, ‘The Tide’ offers a new way of negotiating the relationship between literature and theology.

Introduction to Law and Love

The question of law and love has to be confronted in the soul (as a religious question), in the head (as a political question) and in the heart (as an existential question). This Special Issue of Law in Context tries to make a start in making sense of this multi-faceted question.