Showing papers on "Divinity published in 2003"

Why Do Men Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology

Abstract: Introduction: Anti-Postculturalism (or, The View from Manywheres) 1. Who Sleeps by Whom Revisited (with Lene Balle-Jensen and William Goldstein) 2. The "Big Three" of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the "Big Three" Explanations of Suffering (with Nancy C. Much, Manamohan Mahapatra, and Lawrence Park) 3. Cultural Psychology of Emotions: Ancient and New (with Jonathan Haidt) 4. "What about Female Genital Mutilation?" And Why Understanding Culture Matters 5. The Return of the "White Man's Burden" and the Domestic Life of Hindu Women (with Usha Menon) 6. Culture and Mental Development in Our Poststructural Age 7. A Polytheistic Conception of the Sciences and the Virtues of Deep Variety 8. Fundamentalism for Highbrows: The Aims of Education Address at the University of Chicago Conclusion: From Manywheres to the Civilizing Project, and Back Notes References Acknowledgments Index

The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation

Abstract: Methods and findings from the social sciences are increasingly important for New Testament scholars. Unfortunately, however, anthropology and related disciplines are still unfamiliar territory for many students of the Bible. This work acquaints readers with this territory by providing introductions and basic bibliographic orientations to the application of social-scientific categories to New Testament research.Although it is impossible to know fully how ancient people lived their daily lives, these essays come as close to realizing that goal as we moderns are likely to get. Required reading for anyone who respects Scripture enough to investigate the world in which it was written and to which its writers originally spoke . . . an invaluable resource for pastor, seminarian, and scholar alike. William R. Herzog II, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School

The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism

Abstract: Going far beyond the standard imagery of Rasta--ganja, reggae, and dreadlocks--this cultural history offers an uncensored vision of a movement with complex roots and the exceptional journey of a man who taught an enslaved people how to be proud and impose their culture on the world. In the 1920s Leonard Percival Howell and the First Rastas had a revelation concerning the divinity of Haile Selassie, king of Ethiopia, that established the vision for the most popular mystical movement of the 20th century, Rastafarianism. Although jailed, ridiculed, and treated as insane, Howell, also known as the Gong, established a Rasta community of 4,500 members, the first agro-industrial enterprise devoted to producing marijuana. In the late 1950s the community was dispersed, disseminating Rasta teachings throughout the ghettos of the island. A young singer named Bob Marley adopted Howell's message, and through Marley's visions, reggae made its explosion in the music world.

Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11

Abstract: Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11, by Bruce Lincoln. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xi + 92 pages. Appends. to p. 107. Notes to p. 137. Index to p. 142. $35. From time to time there appears a work (e.g., James Hunter's Culture Wars, Stephen L. Carter's Culture of Disbelief William Martin's With God on Our Side, or Karen Armstrong's Battle for God) that serves to focus the wide-ranging, often contentious, discussion of religion's significance within broader culture dynamics. Bruce Lincoln's Holy Terrors is one such text. Granted, Lincoln's scope ix narrower and his discussion briefer than those of the aforementioned works; nevertheless, his exemplary clarity and incisive insights will doubtlessly give this book an influence well beyond what its brevity might suggest. Lincoln's purpose is clear. As a historian of religions who teaches on the divinity faculty at the University of Chicago and ix an associate of the University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, he wants to understand what role religion had, and continues to have, in the unfolding drama of 9/11, using this particular episode as a vantage point from which to elucidate the more universal influences of religion in contemporary societies. His approach is text-centered, and his analysis primarily rhetorical. He draws his observations from four texts, included in the book's appendices, viz., the final instructions to the 9/11 highjackers (found in the luggage of Mohamed Atta, as well in several other copies), President George W. Bush's address to the nation on October 7, 2001, Osama bin Laden's videotaped address of October 7, 200 l, and Pat Robertson's 700 Club interview of Jerry Falwell on September 13, 2001. On the basis of the rhetoric he finds in these texts, Lincoln distills an array of insights on the societal role of religion. His painstakingly crafted definition of religion, developed in Chapter l, underscores four "domains" constitutive of religious phenomena (discourse, practice, community, and institution) and provides the structure by which he evaluates the religious dimensions of the 9/1 I episode and related events. In Chapter 2, he discusses the rhetorical devices marshaled by both Bush and bin Laden in their statements of October 7, 2001, finding "symmetric dualisms" in them. Even though bin Laden used baldly religious language in his statement and Bush did not, both depicted themselves as defenders of righteousness acting on behalf of a wronged people. This was characterized by Bush as the struggle between terrorists and civilized nations and by bin Laden as the struggle between infidels and the faithful (p. 27). In Chapter 3, Lincoln continues to refine his observations, indicating how the proponents of both sides in this dispute drew on a textual tradition shared by their respective supporters. …

In His Own Image and Likeness: Humanity, Divinity, and Monotheism

Abstract: This book is about nothing less than Genesis 1, or human creation. Humanity, the author convincingly argues, is created within the Priestly tradition as a replacement of God's divine community; human creation marks the decisive moment that P's God separates himself from other gods and institutes monotheism. After discussing the references of God's self-inclusive yet plural first person speech and examining the ramifications of this speech pattern in other biblical texts, Randall Garr discusses the divine-human relationship as it is represented by carefully analysing the prepositions and nouns that characterize it. After highlighting some themes and theological concepts elaborated in Gen 1, it clearly situates the creation of humanity within the programmatic agenda of the Priestly tradition.

The New Divinity and the Origins of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

Abstract: The theological influence of the New Divinity in the formation and character of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) is uncontested among scholars of American religious history and missions. Since the mid nineteenth century, both partisans of missions and nearly all scholarly observers have attributed the origins of the modern American Protestant missionary spirit to the writings of Jonathan Edwards and his self-appointed heirs, those Congregational ministers who came to be called New Divinity men. Edwards proposed a theology of cosmic redemption and supplied the exemplary missionary model in Life of Brainerd (1749), his most popular and most frequently reprinted work. Samuel Hopkins then furnished a theological rationale for missions by revising Edwards' aesthetic concept of “disinterested benevolence” into a practical one of self-denial for the greater glory of God's kingdom and the betterment of humankind.

Milton and Idolatry

Abstract: Noting Milton's frequent identification of himself as Ikonoklastes, idol-breaker, this essay traces his very broad concept of idolatry throughout his poetry and prose. While his Puritan contemporaries thought of idolatry chiefly as pagan or Roman Catholic practices that offer an affront to God, Milton saw idolatry as the disposition to attach divinity or special sanctity to any person, human institution, or material object, and early to late he sought to eradicate that disposition in his readers. His focus is on the way idolatry debases and enslaves human beings and their societies. If worship and absolute obedience are offered only to the transcendent God and if his image is seen to reside in all human beings simply as such (not popes, kings, bishops, institutions, or sacred material objects) then the concomitants must be, he thought, civil and religious liberty and a republic.

Virginity, Divinity and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I

Abstract: Towards the end of Shekhar Kapur’s film, Elizabeth, the attractive young queen kneels before a statue of the Madonna and, taking inspiration from it, transforms herself into ‘the legendary Virgin Queen, formidable, untouchable and unbeatable’.1 In the next scene, Kat Ashley hacks off the queen’s flowing tresses, fits a jewel-encrusted wig on her shorn head, and paints her face unnaturally white. Elizabeth then dons a stiff white farthingale and makes her first public appearance at court as an icon of divinity. In these final shots of this deeply ahistorial drama, Kapur conveys brilliantly the most familiar myth surrounding Elizabeth I, namely that she fashioned her own image and created the cult of the Virgin Queen as a political device to inspire awe in her subjects, consolidate her political power, and signal her intention never to marry.2

Anglo-American postmodernity

Abstract: WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO THINK THAT ? We take Nicholas Lash, formerly Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, as our first exemplar of postmodern theology in the Anglo-American tradition. Lash makes several claims that may strike the (modern) reader as strange. For one, he criticizes accounts of religious experience that assume such experience, at least in its richest and purest forms, to be experience of God . In contrast, he says, “on the account that I shall offer, our experience of God is by no means necessarily ‘religious’ in character nor, from the fact that a particular type of experience is appropriately characterized as ‘religious,’ may it be inferred that it is, in any special or privileged sense, experience of God.” What is it, then, to know God? The word “God” is descriptive and not a proper name, and to believe in God is to believe that “there is something or other which has divine attributes.” The important question, then, is not whether God exists , but how to speak of God without becoming inane. All attempts to speak about God express the speakers’ deepest convictions about the character and outcome of that transformative (creative and redemptive) process in which they and others are engaged. The outcome of this process will define what it is to be human. Thus, Lash says, “human persons are not what we initially, privately, and ‘inwardly’ are, but what we may (perhaps) together hope and struggle to become.”

"My God and My Good Mother": The Irony of Horace Bushnell's Gendered Republic

Abstract: Horace Bushnell is generally regarded as the most influential liberal Protestant personality of the nineteenth century. What remains open for debate, however, is the precise nature and impact of Bushnell's social thinking. This essay explores the relationship between theology, gender, and political economy in Bushnell's life and writings. Challenging recent "republican" interpretations of Bushnell's ministry, the essay argues that this professing social conservative actually confirmed and advanced the expansion of unregulated market capitalism in nineteenth-century America through his lifelong commentary on proper masculine identity. Put simply, Bushnell taught male parishioners and readers to prefer commerce to community in the Whiggish expectation that the two would one day align. Bushnell's gendered thought was rooted deeply in his personal relationships with women. Though calling Victorian men to greater participation in a privatized nuclear home, he refused to assign to them the expressions of true Christian virtue that he believed were the sole province of women. Bushnell's theological justification for the gendered spheres of fellow New Englanders praised female divinity while privileging male self-interest. His formulation of ideal masculinity following the Civil War was practically pagan and thus anticipated the imperial acquisitiveness of a Teddy Roosevelt and various "muscular" Christians. Bushnell thus bequeathed to future generations of religious liberals a social patriarchy at odds with Christian ethics.

Interpreting the truth : changing the paradigm of biblical studies

Abstract: In order to refocus their work so that it can open out into a three-way conversation between themselves, the scriptural text, and the communities interested in the text, Countryman argues that biblical scholars must abandon the over-dependence on analytical method that they favor. Scholars need to find new ways to bring the complexities of the text and its environment more directly into conversation with the complexities of human communities here and now. Countryman strikes out in new directions by stressing that the conversation with Scripture always calls the interpreter and the community of faith to address realities beyond the text. This book offers a challenge both to biblical scholars and to churches, calling them to work together in reforming and renewing their ways of dealing with Scripture.L. William Countryman is Sherman E. Johnson Professor in Biblical Studies at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific.

The divinity of the Hellenistic rulers’, in A.

Abstract: How the greatest and dearest of the gods have come to the city! For the hour has brought together Demeter and Demetrios; she comes to celebrate the solemn mysteries of the Kore, while he is here füll of joy, as befits the god, fair and laughing. His appearance is majestic, his friends all around him and he in their midst, as though they were stars and he the sun. Hail son of the most powerful god Poseidon and Aphrodite. (Douris FGrH76 Fl3, cf. Demochares FGrH75 F2, both at Athen. 6.253b-f; trans. as Austin 35)

British Conquistadors and Aztec Priests: the horror of Southey's "Madoc"

Abstract: To European imaginations in the early nineteenth century, the world was larger than ever before. What Raymond Schwab described as an Oriental Renaissance, an eager European exploration of world cultures in the late eighteenth century, continued the Renaissance of earlier centuries by making the world appear more immense, complex, and ancient than ever before. Translations of Persian love songs and Hindu hymns gave European readers a sense of sympathetic connection with cultures outside the domain of Biblical and Classical traditions, and helped to create a popular taste for scenes of India and the Far East on stage and in poetry. Not only did such Oriental scholars as Sir William Jones publish popular translations, but they also investigated relations between Classical Greek, Arabic, and Indian mythic symbols and concepts of divinity. Contributing to the syncretic idealism of Orient scholarship, Jacob Bryant's A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774-76) conjectured enthusiastically about specific correspondences between Eastern and Western literary traditions, as well as the origins of the Celts and the Saxons before the Roman conquest of Britain. (1) Eighteenth-century Oriental scholarship reflects not only a determination to find commonalities between world civilizations, but also an interest in proving the eminence of Europeans over a hierarchy of more or less advanced cultures. Growing up during the heyday of this movement, scholar-poets such as Robert Southey considered the wide range of world religions, pondering what they saw as a combination of profound truth and poisonous superstition in the universal development of spiritual belief systems. Often these scholarly interests in finding commonality, on the one hand, and in proving eminence, on the other, produced an imbalance in early nineteenth-century travel narratives, histories, fiction, and poetry addressing cultural confrontation. That imbalance is worthy of serious study today, as we experience continued confusion over the impact of "first world" upon "third world" cultures. Perhaps nowhere is that imbalance more striking than in Southey's epic poetry, which continues to disturb his twentieth and twenty-first century readers as much as it once did his contemporaries. However thoroughly researched Southey's epics may be, they focus distressingly on the violence and ritual bloodshed of New and Old World cultures, and certainly Madoc, like the later Tale of Paraguay, seems overtly to justify British imperialism. We are understandably troubled by narratives caricaturing non-Western cultures and apparently valorizing conquest, since as Marlow shrewdly observes in Heart of Darkness, "the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." (2) Nevertheless I contend that the disturbing aspects of conquest in Southey's poems are well worth "looking into." Southey's Madoc, his early epic which engages most directly with European imperialism, deserves careful consideration for what I will call its "hybrid horror." My assessment of this poem's hybrid horror builds upon Homi Bhabha's explanation of hybridity as an alienated response to the grounds of imperial authority, a response which reproduces the voice of imperial justification in a way that estranges it, placing it in a new cultural framework that destabilizes its initial significance. Bhabha describes hybridization as an unexpected outcome of imperialists' and missionaries' attempts to differentiate cultures. Instead of accepting their differences as defined by imperial authorities, native subjects invent new identities as hybrids, becoming an "in-between" that features characteristics of each group, characteristics that cannot be reconciled with a transcendent unity envisioned by any one party involved in a struggle for dominance. …

Cogealing divinity: time, worship and kinship in South Indian Hinduism

Abstract: Daily worship in Hindu temples is characterized by regular repetition. This article juxtaposes iconography and mythology; field data on worship in a Murukan temple in Kalugumalai, South India; and analytic concepts from western and Indian metaphysics, to examine what Gell termed the ‘ritual manipulation of time’. In Hindu cosmology, the materialization of divinity – a prerequisite for worship – is inseparably linked not only to the emergence of time but also to the devolution of divinity into gendered forms. Because gender differences play a central role in iconography, mythology and worship, Hinduism provides a rich cultural resource for debating the morality and practice of human kinship, sexuality and procreation. Not only are there significant homologies between human and divine kinship behaviour, but human marriage patterns in South India display the same blend of repetitive yet changing oscillation as do daily and annual temple liturgies.

İlâhiyat Fakültesi (İlâhiyat Lisans Programı) Öğrencilerinin Sorunları ve Beklentileri

Abstract: The faculties of divinity in our country were reconstructed based on subdivisions in 1998. New Programs formed within this approach, have been applied since 1998-1999 years of instruction. One of these is The Program of Teaching of the Religious Culture and the Moral Knowledge for the Primary Education and the other is The Undergraduate Program of the Divinity. This article is a field-research, performed on a selected sample from the students of Undergraduate Program of Faculties of Divinity of Marmara University and Karadeniz Technical University. In this study we have largely dealt with the problems and expectations of the students, originated from the program and also we have evaluated and interpreted the given data within the results. The aim of this study is to provide with the supporting data to the new arrangements or to the curriculum-processing studies to be done as related to the subject-matter and in this respect to give out certain suggestions.

Die Heroïese Mite Van Die Kind-God Jesus in Die Kindheidsevangelie Van Tomas

Abstract: The heroic myth of the child-god Jesus in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas This article aims to explain the portrayal of Jesus as child-god in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas from the perspective of adult-like children in Hellenistic-Semitic and Greco-Roman literature. It deals with the crux interpretum whether the author narrated the heroic deeds of the child Jesus to depict him as not really human. Previous research approached the issue either from a dogmatic-confessional perspective on the divinity of Christ or from a "Christology from below" perspective, seeking parallels in Gnosticism. This article asks the same question, but from a social historical and social psychological perspective: why did the author feel inspired to compose the mighty (positive and negative) deeds of the child Jesus as if he is an adult? Could the inspiration lie in tales of gods, emperors, and philosophers who were portrayed as wonderworkers occasionally performing miracles in childhood? An answer is sought in the connection between the myth of the child-god and societal expectations of children in Hellenistic-Semitic and Greco-Roman literature.

The Church of Virgins and Martyrs: Ecclesiastical Identity in the Sermons of Eusebius of Emesa

Abstract: Published studies of the extant sermons of Eusebius of Emesa have focused on two of his concerns which, up to this point, have been treated independently of each other: his understanding of the divinity of the Son in the midst of the theological debates of the fourth century and his understanding of the importance of the life of asceticism. In the article that follows, I argue that there was a point of intersection between his theology and his zeal for asceticism, and that this point of intersection was his understanding of human salvation—and thus his understanding of the identity of the church. As creator, "God, the Son of God" transformed created natures while on earth; as savior, "God, the Son of God" transforms human nature into an angelic nature on earth. In his sermons, Eusebius communicated a vision of the church as a body of virgins and martyrs, the former those who represent the church's ascetic ideal of the angelic life and the latter those who sacrifice everything for the church's ascetic ideal.

Transformational Travel for Seminarians: Reading James in Haiti

Abstract: How will we teach the Bible in the twenty-first century? This essay is intended to contribute to that larger discussion in three ways: after a brief introduction, I will, first, state some general working assumptions about the present situation of the church and about teaching the New Testament in the context of a seminary or divinity school; second, I will describe the course “Reading James in Haiti” which I designed and taught in the Spring of 1902; finally, and much more briefly, I will comment on the implications of transformational travel experiences like this one for the ability of seminarians to understand New Testament texts more deeply than the classroom setting allows.

Swift and religion

Abstract: It can be no surprise that Jonathan Swift wrote throughout his life on matters relating to the Anglican church, religion, worship, and discipline. He lived in a kingdom the overwhelming majority of whose inhabitants were believing, observing Christians. In England, much the greater part were baptized and practicing members of the Anglican church, the church established by law (the case in Ireland, as we shall see, was both demographically and politically rather different). Works of theology, divinity, and biblical commentary constituted, in the seventeenth century and through most of the eighteenth century, the most numerous of any class of writings published in Britain. And Swift of course, for virtually all his adult life, was an ordained member of the Anglican priesthood, engaged in its daily duties and its high political interests, and for three decades Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

Transmitting the forms of divinity : early Buddhist art from Korea and Japan

Abstract: Comparing Korean and Japanese Buddhist art, this volume explores the cultural, ideological and artistic exchange between the two countries during the 6th-9th centuries, when Buddhism took hold throughout northeast Asia. Buddhist sculptures in gilt bronze, wood and stone are the main focus of this work, which contains essays by Korean, Japanese and American scholars.

Pedagogy and Practice: Using Wisdom Ways in the Classroom

Abstract: . The Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies Section of the Society of Biblical Literature chose Wisdom Ways, by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, as the basis for a discussion on teaching at its November 1902 meeting in Toronto. Each presenter commented on the underlying pedagogy of the book, sharing exercises and assignments they had used in their classrooms to help students interpret the materials, especially from a feminist and/or liberationist perspective. Adapted from the SBL presentations, this is a different type of review essay that describes the use of a book in three different settings: a free-standing seminary, a state university, and a university-affiliated divinity school. These three distinct contexts are in turn the settings for three individual pedagogical styles. The result is a conversation among author, teachers, text, and students that illustrates the interplay of teaching, learning, and context.

God in society : doing social theology in Scotland today

Abstract: This series is designed to be of particular interest to the intelligent reader concerned with issues surrounding social justice, to Christians and to academics. It is the product of a group constituted by the Centre for Theology and Public Issues, an institution within the School of Divinity, New College at the University of Edinburgh since 1984.