‘Time is not all powerful’: the johannine eschatological vision in eugene vodolazkin’s laurus

Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus employs literary ‘distortion’ to capture and convey the eschatological paradoxes of the Fourth Gospel. Having outlined the complexity and contradictions of the Johannine eschatological vision, this article describes how Laurus meets the challenge presented by this vision. Rather than seeking to resolve the tension between vertical and horizontal eschatological dimensions, Vodolazkin reshapes time itself to accommodate both realised and future-oriented eschatologies. This remythologising of time is a distortion that brings the reader closer to the rich imaginative depths of Scripture: a powerful form of resistance to limited, inflexible accounts of the ‘real’.

Induction of CCN1 in Growing Saccular Aneurysms: A Potential Marker Predicting Unstable Lesions

Growing evidence has suggested that inflammatory responses promote the progression of saccular intracranial aneurysms (IAs). However, a biomarker predicting the progression has yet to be established. This study aimed to identify novel molecules upregulated during the progression using a previously established rat aneurysm model. In this model, aneurysms are induced at the surgically created common carotid artery (CCA) bifurcation. Based on sequential morphological data, the observation periods after the surgical manipulations were defined as the growing phase (on the 10th day) or the stable phase (on the 30th day). Total cell lysates from the CCA with or without an aneurysm lesion were prepared to perform protein array analysis. The protein array analysis revealed that the matricellular protein cellular communication network factor 1 (CCN1) is induced in lesions during the growing phase. Immunohistochemistry corroborated the significant upregulation of CCN1 in the growing phase compared with the stable phase. Simultaneously with the induction of CCN1, significant increases in the number of CD68-positive macrophages, myeloperoxidase-positive cells, and proliferating smooth muscle cells in lesions were observed. Immunohistochemistry of human IA specimens reproduced the induction of CCN1 in some lesions. These findings imply a potential role of CCN1 as a marker predicting the progression of saccular aneurysms.

GOOD DEATHS IN WENDELL BERRY’S SHORT STORIES

This article looks at how Wendell Berry’s short stories depicting good deaths offer a crucial exploration of the incarnate bonds of human affection. They do so, I argue, by pointing us to the vulnerable ordinariness of embodied love. I first describe these good deaths as ‘ordinary’ because of the way that they refuse a heroic mode of standing above the world and instead accept and live into the vulnerable connections that mark our materiality. I show also how this acceptance, and not any attempt to transcend the ordinary, is what opens these deaths up to the sacred, which I argue is a mark of belonging in love to the world and the love that moves the world. In the second section, I outline the relational role death plays in inaugurating and sustaining the gift-giving relational bonds that make up the life of affection in a place, such that there is a sense in which it is death that opens us up to love, even as death always marks an absence.