In recent years there has been a ‘turn’ to thinking about war through the experiences of those touched by it. While this scholarship has generated numerous important insights, its focus has tended to remain on wars’ violences, those responsible for enacting them, and the effects of such violence. In this article, the experiences of pleasure and joy in war that simultaneously take place are placed centre stage. Drawing on three war novels, the article tracks three recurring themes of pleasurable and joyful experiences related to war: bodily pleasures, the ‘togetherness’ of war, and moments of joy that escape war’s reach. Through this focus, war is shown to work across a range of affective registers and as never totalising or universalising in its experience. The article argues that paying attention to joy and pleasure can work to displace war as a focus of analysis, directing attention instead to the experiences of those who live through war and how they survive, sustain, and resist it.

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Joy and war: Reading pleasure in wartime experiences

In this dissertation, I will examine the problem of theological fatalism in St. Augustine and, specifically, whether or not Augustine was philosophically justified in his belief that his views on divine grace and human freedom could be harmonized. As is well-known, beginning with his second response To Simplician (ca. 396) and continuing through his works against the semi-Pelagians (ca. 426-429), Augustine espoused the Pauline doctrine of all-inclusive grace: that the fallen will’s ability to accomplish the good is totally a function of God’s elective grace. What, then, does the fallen will do to work out its own salvation? There is the further issue of how to reconcile Augustine’s rather extreme emphasis on grace in his later works with the more balanced picture we receive in his sermones ad populum, written throughout his forty-year preaching career. In many of these sermons, even those written during the Pelagian controversy, Augustine is careful to leave space for both divine and human initiative in the process of our justification within the totus Christus, or ‘whole Christ.’ How we can understand Augustine in his role as doctor gratiae and as preacher of human freedom will be a major inquiry of this dissertation.The most serious obstacle to moving forward on these problems has been and remains the essentialist interpretation of Augustine’s Trinitarian theology by most commentators. On their interpretation, Augustine thought that there were no real distinctions within the Trinity, with each of the three divine persons and their actions sharing in the absolute unity of the divine essence. Holding this interpretation not only does away with the distinctness of each of the persons, but also requires all of God’s different powers and attributes, including willing and foreknowing, to be coalesced into one another without distinction in the divine essence. God’s foreknowledge is thereby identified with God’s will, which necessarily leads to theological fatalism: God would have to will everything that He foreknows, and God would have to foreknow everything that He wills. Since God is omniscient, He wills everything that will happen, including the future willings of the fallen human will.It cannot be denied that there are texts in the Augustinian corpus that seem to point to a reading of the Trinity as absolutely simple. But this study will endeavor to show that there are also other largely overlooked texts in On the Trinity, the Confessions, and his Commentaries on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis (among others) that argue for various distinctions within the Trinity to make sense of the relation between Creator and creature, and the differences between the divine processions of generation/spiration, and the act of creation. These texts will be shown to parallel very closely the position of the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, which consistently uses the real distinction between God’s essential being and energetic activities (also known as the essence-energy distinction) to avoid the problem of theological…

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Re-Evaluating Augustinian Fatalism through the Eastern and Western Distinction between God's Essence and Energies

This thesis explores University-level legal education in England (specifically Yorkshire) using a theory-oriented case study method as a way to analyse and develop to a new context a suite of concepts derived from the work of Basil Bernstein, including classification and framing, the pedagogic device and pedagogic identities. It uses Canada (specifically Alberta) as a comparator research site using a structured, focused comparison approach (George & Bennett, 2005). The research was triggered by concerns about the impact on University-level legal education of the ongoing changes to the entry level qualifications for the legal profession in England that have been initiated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and the rapid expansion in the numbers of students studying law. The research is centred on a macro-level study of the interplay between the legal professional and his/her documentary and visual representation and the classification and framing of legal knowledge in university law schools in England. It identifies, illustrates and analyses some of the nuances in the interplay between the actors and substantive knowledge base in what Bernstein refers to as the Official Recontextualising Field (ORF) and the Pedagogic Recontextualising Field (PRF) of legal education. It develops Bernstein’s concepts in the context of legal education, most notably through analysis of what is referred to here as a Specialised Recontextualising Field (SRF), which incorporates the contemplation of a range of specialised discourses in legal education. This leads to the development of specialised theoretical identities that emerged from analysis of the research data. These are referred to here as the Democratic Intellectual, the Democratic Professional and the Democratic Technologist. The key findings are discussed leading to proposals for their use in legal education curriculum design and policy development.

A Bernsteinian analysis of the interplay between legal knowledge and the legal professional in university law schools in Yorkshire and Alberta:rule of Law or Rule of Lawyers?

Dilemmas in African Diaspora Fashion

The debate on policies addressing the challenges posed by population ageing pays increasing attention to sustainable and innovative ways to tackle the multidimensional impact this phenomenon has on society and individuals. Moving from the findings of two European research projects, a qualitative study based on a rapid review of the literature, expert interviews, focus groups and case studies analysis has been carried out in Italy. This study illustrates which social innovations have been recently implemented in this country’s long-term care (LTC) sector, and the areas in which further steps are urgently needed in the future. This takes place by first highlighting the existing links between social innovation and LTC, and then by identifying the key factors that can facilitate or hinder the implementation of these initiatives. Finally, the study suggests how to promote social innovation, by strengthening the “integration” and “coordination” of available services and resources, through a—for this country still relatively—new approach towards ageing, based on pillars such as prevention and education campaigns on how to promote well-being in older age.

Social Innovation in Long-Term Care: Lessons from the Italian Case

Some religious doctrines recommend courses of action: inward or overt, ritual or moral, by oneself alone or together with others. That is to say, an utterance of the doctrine in standard conditions has the force of recommending to someone that he undertake the course of action. Other doctrines propose valuations; others again propose beliefs. In the major religions of the world, doctrines of these types are interconnected and organised, more or less, in their schemes of doctrines.

Some Concluding Reflections

Few passages of Scripture intrigued Augustine as much as the first sentence of the book of Genesis. In the Confessions, in his treatises on Genesis, in the City of God, and elsewhere he dwells on it and recurs to it, as though he felt he could not exhaust its suggestions and implications. His reflections on this sentence are ample evidence of the acuteness, force, and fecundity of his mind.

Augustine on the Creation of the World

My object is to suggest some ways of amplifying and applying Bochenski's account, 1 in order to bring out its value for philosophical investigation of the doctrines of particular religious communities

Bochenski on the Structure of Schemes of Doctrines

However it may be with other domains of discourse, when we study religious discourse we cannot disregard the situations in which sentences are spoken or written; we have to take account of utterances of sentences as well as sentences. Yet if we are interested in specific features of some range of discourse we need some way of highlighting those features, leaving others to one side as not immediately relevant to our purpose. With these considerations in mind I shall outline a hypothetical situation as a device for studying how oppositions between doctrines of different religions are possible.

A Model Situation

We have been using the following pairs of sentences among others as working examples of religious doctrines, considering them as possible utterances in S: 

Bl

The Dharma is the path to attainment of Nirvana.




B2

Aim at attaining Nirvana.




B2v

Nirvana is the supreme goal of life.




B3

Live in accord with the Dharma.




B3v

The good life is a life in accord with the Dharma.




B4

Attainment of Nirvana is the only way of emancipation from suffering, which is intrinsic to conditioned existence.




J1

The Torah teaches us to respond rightly to God.




J2

Respond rightly to God.




J2v

God is holy.




J3

Live in accord with the Torah.




J3v

The good life is a life in accord with the Torah.




J4

God is our Lord and Maker, creator of heaven and earth and all that is in them, the judge of all nations and the fountain of life.

William A. Christian

Papers

Some Concluding Reflections

Augustine on the Creation of the World

Bochenski on the Structure of Schemes of Doctrines

A Model Situation

Proposals for Belief