LIVING IN A TIME OF MADNESS: LAST DAYS OF JAVA'S LAST PROPHETIC POET

Shortly before his death in December 1873, the renowned Javanese court poet R. Ng. Ronggawarsita composed a short work of social criticism and Islamic ethics that is among the most celebrated of Javanese literary texts. Serat Kalatidha (The Time of Darkness) reflects upon the avenues that remain open to the ethical subject in what Ronggawarsita calls the “time of madness,” the time of darkness and error that marked his dismal present in high colonial Java. Most celebrated as a prophecy, the poem is, in part, a critical reworking of an early nineteenth‐century prophetic reflection on the Javanese past. My article explores the troubled context in which the author wrote this twelve‐stanza (108‐line) poem and how its text forms both a critical commentary on the state of the poet's current‐day society and a pensive reflection on the ethical imperatives of Islam. In the course of this exploration, I reveal how Ronggawarsita's poem forms a prophecy, not as a foretelling of an already determined future, but rather as a work that moves along prophetic time to provoke in his readers a productive intimacy with both pasts and futures.     

Zur Auslegung von Mc. 433 καθωσ ηδ৹ναντō άō৹ειν

In his reply to O'Hara's criticism above the author maintains as his conviction that the events of 30–29 B.C. are crucial to the understanding of Jupiter's prophecy and that Caesar the Dictator has no part in it. In relation to his first article on the issue (SO 67, 1992, 103–12) he seeks here to clarify what it means that the passage functions at the same time as a prophecy within the epic context itself and as a reference to recent events from the writer's/ reader's point of view. He stresses the necessity of being aware of this double nature of the passage when discussing the linguistic and semantic issues connected with it and finds no evidence in support of O'Hara's inferences.     

The Art of Wounded Hope: Forced Migration,Prophecy and Aesth/Ethics

ABSTRACT

This paper constructs an analogy between art and prophecy, exploring and comparing their relationship to political change. It does so through considering arts-based responses to the contemporary forced migration context in conversation with the book of Jeremiah. Recognizing that the artistic – in the case of Jeremiah, the poetic – can be an important means of resistance for those experiencing exile and injustice, this paper delineates two key ways in which visual arts, poetry, music and theater are playing a prophetic role in relation to migration today. First, the arts can generate prophetic revelation, helping people to see more clearly and truthfully the pain and suffering experienced by forced migrants. Second, the arts can enliven prophetic imagination, helping people to visualize creatively how a world-in-migration could be at its best by offering glimpses of oneness and hope. The paper concludes by pointing out some ambiguities involved in engaging with the arts as a means of prophecy.     

Rough Justice: Lars von Trier's Dogville and Manderlay and the Book of Amos

Abstract

In his films Dogville and Manderlay, Lars von Trier offers an account of divine justice which has paradoxically offended humanists but has struck a chord with some Christian theologians. This paper seeks to show that the account of divine justice in the book of Amos and in the Hebrew Bible more generally is illuminated by juxtaposition with von Trier's work. Importantly, however, the two films cited have to be seen as part of a uncompleted trilogy which means that the criticisms directed at von Trier on the basis of the first film alone need to be reassessed in the light of the second. Key issues that emerge are the relationship between individual and communal guilt and the arrogance involved both in judging and not judging others. Justice is not to be equated with law or individual deserts in either Von Trier or Amos but is more closely related to the inevitable restoration of balance in a natural system. Such justice is rough—both approximate and violent—but arrogant attempts to mitigate that roughness almost always end up with even more approximate and violent results.     

Liberated from the Liberator: Frederick Douglass and Garrisonian Political Theology

I argue that Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison held very different political theologies, even while they seemed to work productively together from 1841 to 1847. Examining Douglass's self-presentation on both sides of his split with Garrison, I conclude that he stifled his Christian moral vision in order to comply with Garrisonian theological ideals while working in New England. After moving to Rochester, New York, Douglass was free to give full voice to his authentic Christian political vision. I explore their differing approaches to the Bible's authority, theological anthropology, and the moral permissibility of force, which influenced their political responses to slavery. Scholars such as John Stauffer and John Sekora have argued that his departure facilitated esthetic and racial forms of emancipation for Douglass; I argue that leaving Garrison allowed Douglass to express not only his authentic literary and black identities, but his true Christian identity as well.     

In vino veritas? Indigenous wine and indigenization in Israeli settlements

In recent years, wineries have proliferated in Israel’s West Bank settlements, some of which are now producing world-class wine. However, growing grapes and making wine in this context represents more than simply commercial viticulture. These wineries are part of a trend to re-establish ancient Jewish winemaking practices, which fosters the imagination of returning and reconnecting to biblical sites. Moreover, high-tech grape science is now being employed to engineer wines from so-called indigenous varietals to create a wine identity for Israel. Some religious settlers regard these developments as the fulfilment of a messianic biblical prophecy. This pursuit of indigenous wine thus bolsters a religiously inflected historical imagination of indigeneity that naturalizes the Jewish presence in this contested territory. This article shows that claims to authentic indigeneity emerging from viticulture entangle high-tech grape science, biblical prophecy and an aesthetic connection to the land so that indigenous wine and an indigenous identity are co-produced in a mutually constitutive process.     

Prophetic Criticism and the Rhetoric of Temporality: Paul Tillich’s Kairos Texts and Weimar Intellectual Politics

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses Paul Tillich’s changing conception of a “prophetic critique” of contemporary culture and society through the notion of a “kairos”, the moment of fullfilled time. It shows how Tillich refers both to a specific notion of prophecy (developed in Max Weber’s reflections on charisma) and to a concept of eschatological time (developed in Karl Barth’s dialectical theology). In different texts from the 1920ies and the 1950ies, Tillich uses the idea of “kairos” for a critique of the “idols” of bourgeois culture that is both radical and urgent. However, read in their historic sequence, these texts also reveal the difficulty of upholding the urgency of such a critique over time – as a result, Tillich’s notion of “kairos” becomes more and more reflexive and self critical as the possibility of prophetic critique is concerned.     

The Jacob Story: Between Oral and Written Modes

In this article I examine the relations between Jacob’s putative oral story and the pre-Priestly narrative. I argue that Hosea’s prophecy presents the version of Jacob's oral story related in his time and antedated by many years the composition of the story-cycle in its written form. Comparison of Hosea’s prophecy and Jacob’s narrative indicates the thorough way in which the exilic author worked the oral story he received in order to fit it to his ideological messages and religious concepts. To further examine the relations between the oral and written modes, I discuss the episode of the treaty between Laban and Jacob (Gen 31,45–54) in light of a Mari letter (A.3592). Comparison of the two episodes indicates that part of the biblical narrative rests on the oral story and other part was written by the late author. Evidently, the long process of oral transmission, the growth of the narratives in its course, and the creative reworking of the author make it impossible to either isolate the early oral layer within the present story-cycle or to date the stages of its growth in the oral process of transmission.     

Prophetic Perfectionism: The Afterlives of Nat Turner and John Brown

ABSTRACT

Recent fiction, film, art, and scholarship on nineteenth-century American abolitionists Nat Turner and John Brown shed light on the politics of their prophetic religion. Both men led violent rebellions against slavery for which they were executed. Prophetic perfectionism drove Turner and Brown but tended to fade in works about them. Exceptions to this pattern of reception include Jacob Lawrence's John Brown series (1941), Nate Parker's film The Birth of a Nation (2016), and Ted Smith's book Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (2014). This essay situates Turner's and Brown's prophetic perfectionism and their reception in the context of contemporary political theologies and aesthetics of religion and race.     

苏州状元谶背后的环境变迁

自宋代以来,苏州地区长期流传着"潮过夷亭出状元"的谶语,并且屡有应验。这一文化现象虽是地域文化发展的结果,但也有着深刻的环境变迁背景,它较为精确地反映了娄江水利形势的历史变迁。在文献丰富的江南地区,类似材料亦不少见,显然,深入发掘、利用此类文献材料,将有利于历史环境变迁的研究。     

Resistance,Charity, and Rebirth in Roberto Rossellini's Rome,Open City

Abstract

With its use of contemporary events, location shots, and a plot that mixes comedy, tragedy, and passion play, Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Rome, Open City founded the movement known as “Italian Neo-Realism.” The film vividly presents the Christian teaching on the relation between religion and politics. Rossellini asserts that a Christian Europe can be reconstructed only on a foundation of charity rather than hate, vengeance, or even justified punishment for Nazi crimes. It is not on the basis of tales of resistance that Italians and Europeans can be reborn, Rossellini argues, but on the basis of the Christian command to “love your enemies.” European rebirth means the installation of a moral order that makes parenthood feasible and respectable. By reflecting on Rossellini's masterpiece, I examine the triumph and the tragedy of the Christian Democratic Europe that Rome, Open City foretold and helped to found.     

From prophecy to apocalypse: the verb tenses of Jerusalem in Robert the Monk's Historia of the First Crusade

In the prologue to his Historia of the First Crusade, Robert the Monk posed this rhetorical question: ‘since the creation of the world what more miraculous undertaking has there been (other than the mystery of the redeeming Cross) than what was achieved in our own time by the journey of our own people to Jerusalem?’ For Robert, the answer was of course simple: nothing was more miraculous. Yet when we answer that question along with Robert, we lose sight of its significance, and how staggering that claim actually would have been in the early twelfth century. For Robert, the events of 1095–9 signalled a new moment in sacred history. Old Testament prophecy had come true in his own day. What ‘was to come’ became what simply ‘was’. For Robert the Monk, prophecy became apocalypse.     

Italian identity: Catholic responses to secularist definitions,c.1910–48

In united Italy, assertions by Catholic militants about their nation's true identity have been bound up with polemic against secularist forces and with claims about the position due to the Church in Italian society. They have insisted that Italy's authentic traditions are Catholic and that her true greatness resides in her being the heart of Christian civilization. Hostile or threatening ideologies, e.g. idealist philosophy and Communism, have been stigmatized as alien to Italian tradition. In the face of Fascism, with which the ‘Catholic world's’ relations were ambivalent, there was a major ideological campaign to assert a Catholic definition of the keyword romanità. The way in which Catholic theoreticians have defined the ‘nation’ in organicist terms have been linked to strategies of ideological defence against state forms, whether liberal or Fascist, perceived to be overweening.     

Capitalism and the Fall of Market Morality: How Piketty,Sandel, and the Skidelskys Vindicate R. H. Tawney's Economic Ethic

This article reappraises the thought of the British economic historian, writer on political economy, Christian socialist, and great intellectual of the Labour Party, R. H. Tawney on market morality. It extracts and synthesizes moral insights from Tawney's two most influential books Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and Equality in order to present his economic ethic, its political implications, and Christian theological roots. Tawney's ethic, which holds that market morality, social ethics, and politics are inseparably linked, is then evaluated in the light of contemporary economists and philosophers, including Thomas Piketty, Michael Sandel, Robert and Edward Skidelsky, and Harry Frankfurt. Tawney's ideas are found to be insightful and useful, particularly in linking unrestrained capitalism with inequality, exploring capitalism's opposition to market morality, finding synergies between theological and secular humanist critiques of capitalism, and in addressing criticisms of the moral significance of equality itself.     

The religious politics of prophecy: Or,Richard Brothers's Revealed Knowledge confuted

The messianic messages delivered to Londoners by the self-styled prophet, Richard Brothers, were regarded by many sceptical observers and pamphleteers as eccentric or, worse still, the embarrassing utterances of someone wishing to reprise the political turmoil of a by-gone era marred by religious ‘fanaticism’. This article shows the extent to which Brothers's messages, as set down in his Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times (1794–1795), were absolutely central to the religious politics and culture of the 1790s—or what one contemporary critic mockingly referred to as the ‘age of prophecy’. Brothers's prophecies came to the attention of the British government, which culminated in his arrest for treasonable practices in March 1795 when he became a cause célèbre, before being confined to an asylum for eleven years. He was deemed a criminal lunatic but, as this article seeks to demonstrate, his ‘prophetic imagination’ arose out of the same rich theological, political and cultural context that spurred ‘radicals’ like Tom Paine, whilst inspiring poets and artists such as William Blake. If the content of his prophecies were regarded by contemporary sceptics for having no validity, it remains true to say that Richard Brothers, as an educated gentleman and naval officer, dramatically altered 18th-century expectations and perceptions of what prophets were and the nature of prophecy itself.     

The Levelling Process as a Function of the Masses in the View of Kierkegaard and Ortega Y Gasset

The present article is an analysis of the emergence of a new Uruguayan author, Armonía Somers (1914–94), as well as the publication in 1950 of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman). It focuses on the Uruguayan social body of the 1950s, when society lived the paradox of recognizing women in its legal structure, but limiting them in the everyday social and cultural life. In this context, Somers's novel symbolically explores what I call the “crisis of feminine subjectivity,” through the creation of a woman who on her thirtieth birthday decided to throw away all the costumes and masks with which society and tradition imposed feminine roles and, naked, tried new ways of being, new subjectivities. Central to this study is an analysis of the different ways in which historical, social, and cultural demands produce certain kinds of human bodies, especially how they produce a woman's body. The specific argument that underlies this article is that the body inserts itself in conflictive and tense manners with the marks imposed on the genders. This article's theoretical contribution lies in its emphasis on the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of “feminine subjectivities” and “historical marked bodies” in a fiction that presents itself as a black box in which Somers finds herself as a woman who became a novelist in the 1950s and in which readers also find themselves questioning the persistence of gender marks on their own social bodies.     

Editorial

For John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, and their later Victorian respondents, the Stoic writer and second-century CE Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius represented a test-case for the sufficiency of the ostensibly masculine practices of askesis and detachment as ethical ideals, specifically in the context of Christianity. A brief passage in Mill's On Liberty (1859) comparing Stoic ethics with Christian ethical practice provoked an extended response from Arnold in an 1863 review essay. Mill and Arnold both used comparisons with Christianity to trace the contours and to explore the limits of Marcus Aurelius's ‘lovable’ nature; in doing so, Arnold in particular enacted a peculiar kind of historical sympathy for both the Marcus Aurelius that was and for a missed rapprochement between classical and Christian ethics. For a series of later writers, including freethinkers, religious conservatives and liberal Christians, Marcus Aurelius either promised or threatened to reconcile Stoicism with Christianity. Assessing the emperor in the light of Christianity became a means both for producing or denying a link to the classical past and for describing the condition of Christianity in England. A key point of contention for these writers and a landmark in the broader debate over Victorian secularization was the question of Marcus Aurelius' role in the torture and killing of 48 Christians at Lugdunum (Lyons) in 177 CE.     

古代谶纬的机缘巧合及在钱币中之妙用

谶纬,是中国古代文化中的一种现象,有着悠久的历史。即:把自然界中发生的偶然事件而神秘化,并用诡秘的隐语、预言作为神的启示,将其视为预示社会安危的决定因素,以告人政事,或昭示国运的兴衰。亦是方士或巫师假借神明来说吉凶祸福的征兆。其中,表现在对钱币的运用上尤为突出,足见其产生的影响。     

Oliver O'Donovan,The Ways of Judgment

Abstract

Investigating how Christians best understand their political role on the receiving side of political authority, the essay revisits the older "citizens versus subject" debate and presents exegetical, doctrinal and historical considerations that suggest keep this tension alive instead of seeking to dissolve it on either side. The author argues that the peculiar interweaving of "citizen" and "subject" traditions characterizes the Christian attitude towards political authority from the outset. This is demonstrated by a fresh reading of Romans 13 in which the arguably "conservative" origin of Christian political thought is shown to bear clear, albeit often overlooked, marks of a genuine "citizen" ethics. Extemporising on Luther's commentary on Romans 13, the essay demonstrates how the idea of a Christian as "subject-as-citizen" is rooted in a theological refusal to compartmentalize the human existence into separate spheres of authority As "embodied soul" the Christian responds to political authority in a way that engages the human being in all its faculties, simultaneously free and bound. The essay concludes by suggesting that the crucial shift in the more recent history of political thought can be explained more readily as a shift from this theologically motivated duality towards a monochrome political voluntarism that insisted a citizen's submission to political rule could be conceived as essentially submission to one's own will.     

‘The Old Woman as Hare’: Structure and Meaning in an Irish Legend

This paper looks at the St Kitts and Nevis Mummies' plays as published in Folklore by Roger Abrahams (1968). It demonstrates that the texts were originally taken from a play published by the Victorian children's author Mrs J.H. Ewing. This play appeared in several editions, most notably in two series issued by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Mrs Ewing's text was itself compiled from three northern English chapbook texts and a version from Silverton, Devon. The relative contribution of these texts to Mrs Ewing's play, and the way she put them together, are both explored.