Profound Encounters: The Love Feast and the Old German Baptist Brethren

The author uses an autoethnographic and narrative approach, based in a postpositivist research framework, to describe and explore the love feast as it is observed among the Old German Baptist Brethren. The "love feast occasion" constitutes a site of prime spiritual and communal significance for members of the group, who represent the largest Plain or Old Order expression of the Schwarzenau Brethren. The occasion, taking place over a full weekend of services, communal meals, informal time for fellowship and "Youngfolks" activities is hosted annually by each district or congregation (as well as being held at the group's Annual Meeting at Pentecost). Its essential feature is a lengthy service held on the Saturday evening that reenacts the central events of Jesus's last meal with his disciples in Jerusalem, prior to His betrayal and death. Discrete but interlinked elements of this highly ritualized service involve preparation, footwashing, a communal fellowship meal, an exchange of the holy kiss and sharing in the bread and wine of Communion. The deeply symbolic and highly ritualized event constitutes an occurrence in which members see themselves as renewing their connection with God, their mystical relationship with fellow members and with the central emphases of Brethren teaching.

Die Festkultur Mariä Himmelfahrt in Warendorf

The Assumption is a Solemnity of the Catholic Church that is celebrated on 15 August. In Warendorf, in the Münsterland region, this is celebrated in a special way. Pilgrimages to the image of the 'Glorious Virgin of Warendorf' take place. The veneration of Mary in the town is expressed in many different ways in the artistic and musical spheres. Every year, new approaches and ideas emerge as to how the veneration of Mary can be expressed. The imposing arches that span the streets of the historic city centre and the various processions in the festive culture have a long tradition. The illumination of the city centre on Saturday evening is a particular highlight for visitors.

A Magnificent Blond Beast: Exploring the Implications of Harlem Renaissance Writer Wallace Thurman as Ghostwriter of a Forgotten Celebrity Gossip Memoir

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the original blonde bombshell Peggy Hopkins Joyce. According to Hopkins’ biographer, however, Basil Woon, an English playwright and gossip columnist was supposed to have been the ghostwriter of this book. My paper will address this discrepancy by focusing on the lack of evidence supporting the Woon theory, and through an analysis using stylometry, close reading and an examination of historical documents, I will argue that Thurman is the more likely candidate as a ghostwriter for Hopkins’ memoirs, just as Hughes suggests. I will be looking specifically at the way the text, which is presented to the reader as a diary written by Hopkins from her early youth to the present day, satirizes the shallowness and excesses of the “roaring twenties.” I will argue that the text is clearly ironic and satirical in style and approach and not only satirizes celebrity, but also a society that unselfconsciously celebrates celebrity, much the way Thurman satirizes the excesses of the Harlem Renaissance in his novel Infants of the Spring. In conclusion, I will show how this book, which has been largely dismissed as celebrity gossip, is transformed into something highly literary by the way Thurman, as ghostwriter and editor, takes Hopkins’ life story and turns it into a satire of the excesses of an era.

PEMBERDAYAAN KETERAMPILAN RETORIKA DAKWAH SANTRI PONDOK PESANTREN MIFTAHUL ULUM PANDEAN WONOREJO BANYUPUTIH SITUBONDO

This assistance is aimed to train students in improving speaking skills in order to make easy in conveying messages and ideas to others. It is Located in Miftahul Ulum Islamic Boarding School. It has two research problems, they are, (1) How is the speaking skill empowerment through discourse techniques to the students in building public speaking communication? (2) How are the obstacles faced by students in Miftahul Ulum Islamic Boarding School?. The assistant explores interview data and documentation data by the data analysis technique. The results show that (1) The activities of muhadharah discourse training in Miftahul Ulum Islamic Boarding School is carried out once a week on Saturday evening. (2) With great motivation, the students will carry out activities with focus on the objectives of the learning process. (3) Muhadharah is carried out by all caretakers and all students in Miftahul Ulum Islamic Boarding School.

Not ‘a Sincere and Yet Radiant World’ but ‘Trashy Imaginings’ – Representations of Popular Culture in Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction

This chapter discusses Fitzgerald’s conflicted relationship with popular culture in the interwar period from 1918 until his death in 1940. Magazines like the Saturday Evening Post were lucrative, and helped Fitzgerald to establish his early flapper ‘brand’, but he was often wary of being identified with these commercial magazines. Fitzgerald carefully uses references to popular culture in order to disrupt our expectations of his lyrical style as well as the established magazine short story conventions of the 1920s and 1930s. By using such experimental techniques whilst also courting a mass audience, Fitzgerald can be seen pursuing literary acclaim as well as financial security: joint aims that he harboured throughout his career. This chapter shows how Fitzgerald uses parody to shed new light on popular cultural forms of the period, as well as to interrogate the concept of leisure in a period in which there was a great upheaval of cultural values. He identifies with black entertainers and African American culture as a means of theorizing his own relationship with the entertainment industry. His use of parody enables him to navigate fluidly between popular and ‘high’ culture, and to undermine commercial magazine formulae, whilst establishing his own brand of literary modernism.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Fiction

F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered primarily as a novelist, but he wrote nearly two hundred short stories for popular magazines such as the widely-read Saturday Evening Post. These stories are vividly infused with the new popular culture of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, from jazz and blues music to motion pictures and performing arts. This book demonstrates how popular culture had a deep impact on Fitzgerald’s work, not just in terms of evoking period detail, but by confirming Fitzgerald as an experimental writer whose popular short stories reflect the serious modernist concerns occupying writers such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Parker, and Langston Hughes. This book explores how popular culture impacted on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary aesthetics on both thematic and formal levels, to a greater extent than previously recognised. Encompassing spheres of both American studies and cultural studies, this book offers a revisionist perspective on Fitzgerald’s short fiction of the interwar period, which is often overlooked in favour of the novels, especially The Great Gatsby. By exploring Fitzgerald’s fascination with leisure, specifically the intertwined cultural spheres of dance, music, theatre, and film, this book argues that he innovatively imported practices borrowed from other popular cultural media into his short stories, deploying disruptive techniques of ambiguity and parody that sit in tension with reader expectations of his lyrical style and the commercial publication contexts of his stories.