“The Lord Your God is God of Gods and Lord of Lords”: Is Monotheism a Political Problem in the Hebrew Bible?

Erik Peterson's famous monograph on “Monotheism as a Political Problem” argued that some pre-Cappadocian Christian theology was at risk of correlating too closely the universal rule of God and the apparently universal rule of Caesar. Peterson claimed that Cappadocian trinitarian theology and Augustinian eschatology ruled out such dangerous political-theological analogies for future Christian thought, thereby undermining the type of political theology that engaged Carl Schmitt. Peterson overlooked key resources for his argument, however, by neglecting the development of monotheism in the Hebrew Bible. Israelite religion, in fact, does not exhibit a correlation between monotheism and theological legitimation of political order, but the reverse. “Political theology” in the Hebrew Bible begins to fade precisely as a more transcendent and universal monotheism emerges in the biblical literature of the exilic and post-exilic periods. This implies that Peterson was mistaken to claim monotheism itself as the primary source of the political-theological problem he identifies.     

“…according to thy Righteousness”: The Righteousness of God as Motivation in the Hebrew Psalms of Lamentation

ABSTRACT

When urging God to act, the Old Testament psalms of lamenta-tion often appeal to divine qualities. Among these qualities is the righteous-ness of God. This paper will accentuate the active, salvific, theocentric char-acter of this righteousness, opposed to a reactive, distributive view, well known from several interpreters.     

Tree of Letters, “Tree of Life:” How a Letter of the Torah Can Transform (the Human Being Made in) the Image of God1

Venerable tradition allies the Torah with Wisdom, a “tree of life.”2 2.?Prov. 3.17–18. View all notes The tree of life is an ancient mythic symbol of the earth mother. This essay demonstrates the capacity of the Torah to facilitate a reintegrative return to the mother when, as now, the religious narratives falter that once seemed to ensure the unity of man made in the image of God conceived only as the Father. Participating in the process of this return one discovers beneath the Torah's fractured narrative surface a reduplicative pattern based on the logic of the unconscious, which is founded on the repressed prelinguistic bond with all life formed at the maternal breast. This pattern reflects the recombinant properties that the unconscious shares with the earth, which breaks down and regenerates dead matter as the unconscious breaks down and regenerates the meaning of words. Folded into rhetorical tropes as into a single letter, the Torah's regenerative pattern repeatedly recalls to man what it means to be human, unique among but also one with all the diverse life of the earth.     

In the name of God: translation and transformation of Chinese culture,foreign religion,and the reproduction of “Tianzhu” and “Shangdi”

Translation between one language and culture into another assumes that a fundamental set of commonalities exist between the two cultural and linguistic contexts. In the case of the Christian Bible, Chinese translations not only involved translating words into Chinese, but also adapting and transforming an exotic Western religion for local sensibilities in such a way that Christianity might be recognized as a legitimate system of thought within a Chinese cultural milieu. Focusing on the perspective of different Chinese translations of the name of the Christian God, this article examines the history of the debate regarding the issue of translation, and the approaches adopted by the Catholic and Protestant faiths. It examines the reclamation and evolution of traditional Chinese vocabulary into new terminology through the application of Western religious concepts, and the ways in which indigenous Chinese society accepted these concepts, with an eye towards examining the course of historical progress through the history of social adoption of these ideas.     

‘It’s Like Biting Your Own Tail’: Pedro Lemebel’s Queer Response to the Challenge of Subversion in Neoliberal Times

Using the methods of textual analysis and in conversation with both Latin American cultural studies and queer studies, the essay examines the ways that Pedro Lemebel’s diverse body of work – ranging from live performances, fiction, non-fictional crónicas, and interviews – engages the limits of subversion in neoliberal times. On the one hand, Lemebel’s work has been routinely framed in terms of its subversion of gendered, sexual, and political norms. On the other hand, scholars and commentators have not deeply engaged the many ways that Lemebel’s own work comments on and represents the challenges of producing subversive cultural productions in a globalized, late capitalist environment in which subversion, including his own, can be undone precisely when it is most celebrated, valued, and commodified. Reading Lemebel’s commentaries and interviews as producing cultural criticism that complements his better-known crónicas’ and performances’ ideological narratives, the essay argues that Lemebel’s oeuvre repeatedly addresses the challenges of performing a delicate dance between resistance and co-optation, given his acknowledged inseparability from the market. Taking Lemebel as a model for this balancing act, the essay ultimately aims to reveal and critique some of the ways that we academics tend to read sexual dissidence as successful subversion without recognizing its complications and limits.     

The Modernization of Iran and the Development of the Persian Carpet Industry: The Neo-Classical Era in the Persian Carpet Industry, 1925–45

The two decades, 1925–45, witnessed a dramatic transformation and revitalization of the Persian carpet industry in response to developments in Iranian governance, society and economy. Two historical watersheds were covered by that period, notably the replacement of the Qajar dynasty by a modernizing administration under Reza Shah Pahlavi, and the subsequent wartime occupation of Iran jointly by the Soviet Union and Great Britain. It was during those two decades that Iran acquired a centralized system of government and the beginnings of a modern industrial base. The accompanying social transformation brought about the emergence of new classes of administrators and managers who constituted the dominant elite of the Reza Shah era. This twin process of centralization and modernization had a telling impact on Iranian culture and the arts, including the carpet arts.     

‘Not on Your Life’: Cabinet and Liberalisation of the White Australia Policy, 1964–67

The liberalisation of the White Australia policy in the mid-1960s was a seminal event in Australian history. It marked the beginning of the end for the racial conception of society which had defined the federation since the late-nineteenth century. Cabinet’s discussions of the proposed changes during these years demonstrate that most Australian political leaders were not only fundamentally opposed to reform but also unconvinced by arguments emphasising the policy’s administrative inconsistencies, lack of humanitarianism and racially discriminatory features. Nor were they entirely swayed by arguments of diplomatic expediency, which had been advanced by senior Immigration and External Affairs officials since the 1950s. The decline of British race patriotism in the early 1960s weakened the ideological foundations of White Australia and allowed policy-makers to reconsider its foreign policy implications, especially in terms of Australia’s relations with Asia. Although cautious, the reforms of the mid-1960s represented an important break with the policy’s fundamental principles and provided the groundwork for further liberalisation and the formal abolition of White Australia in the 1970s.     

Is Planning “Under Attack”? Chronicling the Deregulation of Urban and Environmental Planning in England

Successive attempts to reform planning practice in England have given rise to an impression that planning is “under attack”. Various academic commentaries have performed the valuable service of cataloguing aspects of this reform agenda, often within the context of the analytical framework offered by neoliberalization. In this paper, we seek to chronicle the cumulative effects of the sustained programme of neoliberalization to which urban and environmental planning has been subjected in England over a period spanning approximately the last 15 years. In doing so, we hope to show why planning has been such an intractable issue for all governments that have sought its reform irrespective of the particularities of their political agenda.     

Commentary: In the shadow of liberalism? Comments on Neil Smith's “The Endgame of Globalization”

In this commentary, I respond to Neil Smith's essay “The Endgame of Globalization.” Smith's analysis of the three rounds of U.S. administrations' attempts to complete a project of global economic dominance and the recurrent nationalism that undermines such a project is an important and insightful contribution to understanding the workings of American imperialism and current national politics. However, I argue that his critique of liberalism and theorization of globalization in this essay are weakened by, on the one hand, a narrow definition of liberalism and a failure to address some key philosophical and political questions that arise as a result of its critique, and, on the other, a notion of power that obscures the paradoxical nature of globalization and the centrality of gender and other markers of difference to its operation. In line with critical feminist and postcolonial scholarship, I suggest that important theoretical insight is lost by neglecting conflicting accounts of liberalism, neoliberalism and globalization from alternative perspectives.     

“From one April to another”: remembering and acknowledging the Holocaust in the poetry of Michael Longley

Michael Longley has written and spoken of the responsibility to commemorate the Holocaust in a manner which is free from historical or political distortion. This article will consider his poetry about the Holocaust in the light of these statements, arguing that the epigraph in Gorse Fires (1991) from the work of Paul Celan provides an indication of Longley's strategy. The close association of elegy and botanical life in Longley's work manifests in the reconfiguration of remembrance poppies in relation to Celan and the Holocaust. The article discusses Longley's work in relation to Ireland's refugee policies during the Second World War, with recourse to the poems “Buchenwald Museum” and “Poppies”. Finally, the article considers Longley's personal link to the Holocaust through his friend Helen Lewis. The representation of the Holocaust in Longley's poetry is always associated with other traumatic events and this article extracts the threads which entangle Longley's evocations of historical violence.     

“Neptune to the Common-wealth of England” (1652): the “Republican Britannia” and the continuity of interests

ABSTRACT

In the seventeenth century, John Kerrigan reminds us, “models of empire did not always turn on monarchy”. In this essay, I trace a vision of “Neptune’s empire” shared by royalists and republicans, binding English national interest to British overseas expansion. I take as my text a poem entitled “Neptune to the Common-wealth of England”, prefixed to Marchamont Nedham’s 1652 English translation of Mare Clausum (1635), John Selden’s response to Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo Grotius. This minor work is read alongside some equally obscure and more familiar texts in order to point up the ways in which it speaks to persistent cultural and political interests. I trace the afterlife of this verse, its critical reception and its unique status as a fragment that exemplifies the crossover between colonial republic and imperial monarchy at a crucial moment in British history, a moment that, with Brexit, remains resonant.