Donbass Hierotopy in Elena Zaslavskaja’s Poem “Novorossia of Thunderstorms. Novorossia of Dreams” (2020)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the creation of the hierotopy of modern warring Donbass in the poem by Elena Zaslavskaja “Novorossia of Thunderstorms. Novorossia of Dreams” (2020). The article shows how the archetypes of cultural memory are actualized under the wartime circumstances and in the situation of ext­reme existential choice. One of the most ancient cultural archetypes of Russian culture is the image of Russia as a sacred space, which synthesizes the archaic image of the holy kingdom and Christian ideas of holiness as the feat of self-sacrifice. The author analyzes the mechanisms of creation in the poem of the image of Lugansk-Svyatograd included in the sacred Christian space due to the self-sacrifice of its inhabitants during the war with the Ukraine since 2014.

Žižek's Pandemic

In the first part of this article on Žižek's recent book Pandemic! I show how he develops a political theology of the spirit through a discussion of social distancing. In this argument Žižek connects the idea of physical distance to the biblical story of the resurrection, in which Jesus says to Mary Magdalene “noli me tangere” (“touch me not”), in order to imagine the emergence of a community of spirit from the social, political, and economic ruin caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrasting this community of spirit to the Chinese Communist Party's Foucauldian response to the outbreak of the virus, Žižek suggests a turn away from Prometheanism and the logic of domination toward a new posthuman humanitarianism based on a recognition of human weakness, vulnerability, and fragility. In Žižek's view, this turn toward a new form of humility would emerge from the final disenchantment of the spirit of capitalism and a recognition of the difference between human work, which contributes to a meaningful world, and bestial labor that dehumanizes and means nothing. Thus, the article shows how Žižek thinks about the pandemic in terms of a crisis of late capitalism and the possibility of a new spirit of communism. While the presexual nonlife of the virus is comparable to the drive of capitalism in respect of its unthinking will to replication and reproduction, Žižek founds the basis of humanity in our (human) mortality and being toward death that open out onto a new horizon of releasement (Gelassenheit) beyond biotechnoeconomic nihilism. The conclusion of the article, therefore, shows how Žižek imagines that the pandemic presents humanity with an existential choice about the way we organize social life. This choice is between the biopolitical domination of Chinese authoritarianism that seeks to control every aspect of life, American disaster capitalism that accepts the brutality of the state of nature, and finally Žižek's utopian spirit of communism based on a recognition of human and planetary finitude.

Wisdom in the Qur’an and the Islamic Tradition

Wisdom is a crucial qur’anic concept that has been discussed in richly variegated ways in the Islamic tradition, including in qur’anic exegesis, Islamic theology and philosophy, Islamic law, and Islamic spirituality. This article offers a general overview of the role of wisdom in the Qur’an and an interpretive presentation of its meaning, with a specific focus on a number of significant Muslim scholars and sages in classical and contemporary eras, such as al-Ghazali, Rumi, Ibn al-’Arabi, and Said Nursi. The article is organized around three questions to the qur’anic text and Muslim sources: How is wisdom a special gift from God? Why is it so precious? Why does it require a certain existential choice? The Qur’an considers wisdom as a gift from God that is linked closely with revelation. Ultimately, in the qur’anic tradition, wisdom is about understanding how the reality points to transcendent beauty, life after death, and living accordingly, in gratitude, with balance and justice.

Pedagogical support of adolescents’ self- development in additional education

Following the methodology of existential pedagogy, we believe that a person's upbringing should proceed, first of all, from his understanding of freedom, a desire to become what he represents himself, therefore, the most important component of the process of upbringing a free person is the pedagogical support of his self-development. The article reveals the pedagogical possibilities of additional education for children in the formation of a self-developing personality of a child, shows the conditions for creating a subject-oriented educational environment, which consists in ensuring the possibility of developing and implementing an interesting self-development project for students, eventfulness of the educational process, ensuring the formation of a need for self-development through the creation of problem situations associated with the need to overcome, purposeful and systematic use in the educational process of methods and techniques aimed at the formation of moral value orientations. The conditions are disclosed on the example of describing some aspects of the educational activities of the Galaktika Children's and Youth Center for Space Education in the city of Kaluga, the Constellation Center for the Development of Children and Youth Creativity in the city of Kaluga and the Regional Ecological and Biological Center of Students. The article proposes the author's methodology «My ideal», aimed at studying the image of «I-ideal» adolescents aged 11 to 14 years, developed in the context of a reflexive-value approach to pedagogical support of self-development of adolescents in additional education. The article presents the results of an empirical study of the experience of pedagogical support for self-development of adolescents in the system of additional education (on the example of the city of Kaluga), which showed that educational practices of the development of value-semantic and reflexive-regulatory spheres of a teenager's personality have been accumulated in institutions today. Along with this, it is necessary to systematically and technologically approach the implementation of pedagogical support for self-development of adolescents in additional education, aimed at forming the readiness of pupils for existential choice, independent creation and responsible implementation of the project of their own life.

The study of the readiness of adolescents to self-development in line with the existential approaches in pedagogy: results of an pilot examination

The article considers the problem of studying the current level of adolescents' readiness for self-development, which is one of the key ones in the modern educational system in the Russian Federation. The solution to this practical problem appears as an important and necessary step in determining the essence of pedagogical support for the self-development of adolescents and its technological content. Carrying out a study in line with existential approaches in pedagogy, a guideline is made on understanding the adolescent’s readiness for self-development as the formation of the adolescent’s personality, able to live life on the basis of his existential choice, conscious of its meaning and realizing itself in accordance with this choice. The paper proposes the structure and criteria for the readiness of adolescents to self-development, compiles a package of psychodiagnostic techniques aimed at studying its value-semantic, motivational, activity and reflective-regulatory criteria, presents the procedure and results of an experimental study in which 2000 schoolchildren from the cities of Kaluga and Kaluga took part area. Diagnostic results revealed a high level of severity of the components of the value-semantic and motivational sphere in adolescents, which indicates a tendency of the individual to a subjective position. However, poorly expressed indicators of the reflexive-regulatory sphere, which, along with the presence of separate indicators of the value-semantic sphere, allow us to fix the problem of adolescents 'readiness for self-development, which determines the need for organizing pedagogical support for teenagers' self-development. The study showed that there are typical indicators of the formation of the essential spheres of personality typical for adolescence, however, there are features dictated by gender, age differences and differences in the sociocultural environment. Acknowledgments: The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 20-013-00616.

The “double being” of the human being: culture as the basis for becoming a personality

The main purpose of this article is to prove that one can become a personality only through culture. The authors propose to regard culture as a relatively autonomous spiritual sphere, which transcends the narrow requirements of the concrete society in its historical limitations. They argue that personality is the highest level of human development to emerge in culture, whereas the level of a biosocial organism is provided by society. The authors claim that only culture, be it religious or secular, contains an existential and spiritual imperative which demands each human being to realize one’s own potential humanity. They explain why in a postmodern world culture becomes an “existential choice” of each human being, depending on one’s free will: to inherit the culture, to become a human being of humanity or not. In the Free school of philosophy and culture seminars (Odesa, Ukraine), the authors propose to enter the field of culture through the mutual interpretation of a chosen masterpiece of world literature and to link its message with our lives.

Geoffrey Hill’s Poetic Incarnational Theology

Geoffrey Hill’s poems are saturated with the cluttered bleakness of the nihilistic view of the natural world, but in Hill’s own Christian incarnational theology it is precisely this filthy world into which Christ was incarnated in order to redeem humans from Original Sin. Fortified with but also rattled by the Incarnation and the doctrine of Original Sin, in his poems Hill is faced with the profound, agonizing existential choice to embrace Christ or reject Christianity as a farce, and it is this perilous pose that serves as the theological grounding of the oeuvre the man who now, sadly, was the greatest contemporary Christian poet.