The Rhetoric of the Expressions in the Song by the Sea (Exodus 15,1-18)

The author considers the expressions used in the Song by the Sea (Exodus 15,1-18) in connection with the commonly accepted bipartite structure of the Song. He analyzes the expressions by categorizing them, grouping them, and considering their rhetoric. This literary analysis, supported by tables and graphic illustrations, highlights the basic rhetoric of the Song. The two parts of the Song have different themes but an interconnected rhetoric centered in Yahweh and his relationship with Israel and her enemies.     

An analogy of the song of songs and genesis chapters two and three

Song of Songs is the love story of tha ages. It encompasses all the drama known of love, naturally and spiritually. In this writing is presented the controversy that preceded the canonization of the Song of Songs within Judaism and early Christianity. Presented is an overview of the vehicles that have been used in the exegeses of the Song of Songs as well as a discussion of the traditionally held allegorical interpretation of the Song. Within this writing there is also a discussion of the debate that still persists due to the view held by some scholars that the poetry of the Song is a translation of pagan litany when utilizing the Cult Theory. It is the intent of this writing to suggest an analogy between the Song of Songs and the book of Genesis, chapters two and three. In using the tool of analogy this writer discovered that there exists aspects of likeness, as well as that of contrast. The Song becomes, in a sense, a parable in which the allegorical interpretation of the Song is not considered in its traditional sense. Utilizing the Drama Theory, the principle characters in this consideration are the Shulamite woman, the Rustic lover, and the king. There are reflective qualities that exist in the Song of Song to Chapters two and three of Genesis. As noted by Francis Landy, ''The Song is a reflection on the story of the garden of Eden, using the same images of garden and trees…''.     

War-Games in the Song of Songs: A Reading of Song 2,4 in Light of Cognitive Linguistics

While the Song of Songs is often considered a tender love po-em, it also uses military metaphors to describe the loving relationship of its characters. This suggests that the Song’s concept of love may be more com-plex and perhaps more paradoxical than is usually assumed. Cognitive Lin-guistics, which currently represents the central point of reference for the study both of ordinary and literary metaphors, can shed light on the Song’s concep-tualization of love in terms of war. The present article provides i) a presenta-tion of some insights on metaphorical phenomena coming from Cognitive Linguistics, and ii) a reading of a paradigmatic warlike metaphor, i.e. Song 2,4, in light of this new, pioneering approach.     

Passion and compassion of god in the old testament

Abstract

The point of departure is the Kitamorian “Pain of God Theology”. However, the present survey is that of exegesis and of biblical theology. We pose the question whether the concept of the “immutability of God” is that of the OT? We believe our focal texts (Hos 11,8; Jer 31,20; Isa 63, 9+15) do challenge that notion. The righteous God of Israel is not presented as a vindictive god, who delights in judgement. Rather, the glimpses of God's “emotions”, read “passions”, suggest a more complex God‐image. The righteousness of God demands judgement, whereas his compassion finds another solution. We find that female and masculine imagery in connection with God's attitude and feelings toward his people, are frequently interchangeable. The all‐embracing motherly love of God may be seen as an expression of God's heart in tension between inevitable judgement and compassionate love. But the same aspect may also be expressed in the father/son relationship. The passion of God in OT is not a static or inherent condition of God's being. Rather, the anthropomorphic (or, anthropopatic) expressions may be glimpses of a rare “I‐You” relationship between God and his people Israel. The passion of God then becomes the most profound expression of God's dynamic response to man's fatal situation.     

The Tragedy of Politics: Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare uses the story of the two lovers to dramatize the tragedy of politics. The excessive love of self that characterizes the two serves as a metaphor for the larger story of Rome's descent into tyranny. Unless love of country, that is, love of one's fellow-citizens, tempers self-love, a state loses its capacity to sustain even that degree of freedom that belongs to kingly rule. But Shakespeare also depicts the love of Antony and Cleopatra for each other as something noble; there is something worthy of our love that is higher than freedom. The tragedy of politics lies in the opposition of these two loves.     

Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity

ABSTRACT

Across a broad range of late nineteenth-century French medical texts that described the newly denoted sexual pathologies of frigidity, inversion, fetishism, nymphomania, sadism and masochism, one finds a term being used for which no current equivalent exists. This term is l’amour morbide – morbid love. Its use was initially as common in respectable medical texts as it later became in erotic fictional writings. In some cases, it appeared to refer to a particular sexual pathology, albeit one which troubled the very notion of perversion as aberrant or abnormal. This article considers the role that l’amour morbide played in the sorting of medical terminology for describing sexual perversions in late nineteenth-century France, and examines what its relationship was to degenerationist thought. Engaging with Ian Hacking’s notion of “transient mental illnesses” produced by unique cultural ecologies, it is proposed that morbid love occupied the space between decadent culture of fin-de-siècle France on the one hand, and on the other hand degenerationist frames adopted by French doctors in the context of international medical and psychiatric conversations.     

A Thematic Analysis of “Love” and “Truth” in Caritas in Veritate

Abstract

The encyclical Caritas in veritate uses love as its guiding theological theme, and this innovation exposes the encyclical to critical reflections from some of the greatest theological minds of the mid-twentieth century. This article attempts to revive these critiques in order to analyze Benedict XVI’s use of caritas. Does Benedict’s use of love differ from his predecessors, and is it in any way more adequate? Are the critiques leveled against a social ethic of love merely the product of a hopelessly cynical age, or is love merely a species of interpersonal amity-inapplicable to broader social contexts? Does the fusion of love with the fundamentally contested notion of truth clarify what the Pope means by caritas, or is this conceptual marriage fraught with imprecision and inconsistencies?     

Friendship and love in the lives of two twelfth-century English saints

For twelfth-century religious the vow of chastity did not mean renouncing a rich affective life. Along with the love of God, Aelred of Rievaulx and Christina of Markyate both found room in their lives for profound emotional relationships with several individuals. These relationships were not carnal but to call them ‘friendship’ underestimates their strength and passion. The modern distinction between passionate sexual love and passionless asexual friendship is inappropriate here. ‘Spiritual love’ best describes these relationships: deep and exclusive without being carnal, involving the passions of the soul rather than those of the body. Vitae survive for both Christina and Aelred, and Aelred also wrote several treatises on the subject of love and friendship. The biographers and Aelred himself followed in a medieval tradition of using the language of erotic love to describe spiritual relationships. These spiritual love relationships did not fit the monastic ideal of love (caritas) towards all; they were particular and exclusive (in each person's life, the several relationships were sequetial, not simultaneous). But they do indicate that twelfth-century monasticism provided a channel for the emotions we today connect with erotic love, without the rupture of vows of chastity or virginity.     

Is Francesco Patrizi’s L’Amorosa Filosofia a heterodox reading of the Symposium?

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on L’Amorosa Filosofia, perhaps the most compelling response to Ficino’s De Amore produced in the sixteenth century, as it is centered on the notion of love as philautia, based upon a naturalistic and psychological interpretation. The learned lady Tarquinia Molza, the most important interlocutor of Francesco Patrizi, affirms that love, from its beginnings in the inner self to its end, when reaching the divine, cannot but be a phenomenon that engages the sense of touch, showing a naturalistic attitude toward the body and an interest in the mediation between matter and spirit. Contrary to popular notions of self-love as selfish and callous, an honest man must necessarily love himself first in order to love others. In The Praise of Folly, Erasmus also tackles the concept, making Folly praise Philautia as a fundamental means for happiness. More relevant to Patrizi’s work, in Mario Equicola’s De Natura de Amore, there is a long digression on the virtues of self-love.     

Montaigne,Tocqueville, and the Politics of Skepticism

Abstract

Shakespeare shows how enforceable contract not only undergirds the city of Venice, which makes a multicultural society possible, but its corrosive effects on non-contractual relationships like friendship, love, and marriage. This is evident in the decisions, actions, and relationships of Antonio, Bassanio, Portia, and Jessica. Although Shakespeare concludes the play on a happy note, the conclusion one can reach is that, despite its advantages, regimes based on commerce and contract fail to create the conditions for friendship, love, and marriage to flourish.     

Wedgwood’s Glazes: A Poetic Sequence Derived from Glaze Chemistry with Contextual Essay

Abstract

The Wedgwoodian heritage of Stoke-on-Trent’s pottery industry is examined from the perspective of an ‘outsider’ and through the double-lens of glaze chemistry and poetics. These glazes, in their acrobatic language and hieroglyphic formulae, formulate a new perception of Stoke. New expressions and perspectives are described that emerge free of a mythologized past and interrupt the narrative of this creative heritage. The poems are as much about demythologized approaches to heritage as they are about identification with a foreign place; a re-psychogeography.     

Bradley Holt,Thirsty for God: A Brief History of Christian Spirituality

Abstract

In this essay, I consider the relationship between more radically open conceptions of democracy and the recent "return of religion" as the return of distinct, particular religions. The radical democracy of figures such as Derrida, Badiou, and Hardt and Negri is found to be not radical enough to be open to the particular religious other. Derrida's "religion without religion" does violence to the particularity of concrete religious traditions, Badiou appropriates Paul's universalism while abandoning the particularity and difference in his conception of collective identity, and Hardt and Negri advocate a "politics of love" while severing that love from its ground— namely, God. I then show a way of rethinking both society and Christianity so that Christianity finds a place in society and society makes room for Christianity. A radical Christianity devoid of self-privilege and triumphalism provides a model for an intersubjectivity of love in which the other really comes first. Paul's radical conception of membership in the body of Christ accomplishes precisely what radical democracy fails to do: it allows for heterophony as well as polyphony, and incoherence as well as commonality. It is only when church and society allow the possibility of incoherence and heterophony that they are truly open to the other, and it is only when they are truly open to the other that they satisfy the demands of a truly radical democracy and radical Christianity.     

Love and Marriage Among the Ruins

Abstract

Walker Percy articulated that the American South, liberated by civil rights legislation and economic growth from former strife, was needed in a new quest to save the Union. Percy believed that the troubles facing America were the philosophical and anthropological failures of late-modern thought. Difficult consequences emerged from these failures in the form of failed marriages. The distinctive capacity of the person to intimately love the other for the other's own good is displaced, if not eliminated, by theorists who narrow man to a this-worldly preoccupation while simultaneously denying his unique aspects. One injured element, broached by Percy in his novels The Second Coming and Love in the Ruins, is the shared love of the domestic family that becomes misconceived and misshaped in an age no longer conversant with the sacramental significance of man. Percy's discerning observations in these novels afford a unique purchase on the institution's diminishment in the midst of a humanistic age. The failure of this basic and complex love is one of the most deeply and painfully felt consequences achieved by the intrapersonal splits that have resulted from the age of theorist–consumerism. From man's failures to move beyond ideology and theory emerge his inability to even understand love's connection with his existence.     

‘Be Amorous,But Be Chaste: Sexual morality in Byzantine learned and vernacular romance

Abstract

Tales of love and romance, although love stories were regarded of less account than other literary themes, had always been a part of the literature of ancient Greece:

‘;There never was a time in the history of Greek Literature when a good story of personal adventure of any kind, erotic or non-erotic, tragic, comic or scandalous, wonder-seeking or realistic, was not welcome to readers or listeners, so long as it was presented within the context of an approved literary form, or on a suitable oral occasion. The Greeks from the earliest times were familier with all kinds of stories and enjoyed them.’     

A Theo-Politics of the (Im)proper: Jacques Derrida vis-à-vis Graham Ward

Abstract

The contemporary situation of the "war on terrorism" provides a particularly challenging environment in which to seek to interpret and apply Jesus' commandment to love our enemies. This commandment received major emphasis during the first few centuries of the church, but subsequent interpretation of it has become increasingly complex. Nevertheless, I argue for the broad applicability of the commandment and show that it provides a check against the polarizing and dehumanizing tendencies which accompany modern warfare, because an understanding of the love of enemies reveals that the real enemy is enmity itself. Finally, the article examines a group of sermons preached in the immediate aftermath of September 11 and concludes that while the majority neglect to speak of love for enemies, those preachers that do are able to bring it to bear in relevant and powerful ways.     

On the origin and presentation of images of traveling Buddhist monks on pilgrimage for sutras with tame tigers in the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes

Abstract

The creation of the “images of traveling Buddhist monks on pilgrimage for sutras with tame tigers” preserved in the Mogao Grottoes resulted from a syncretic cultural and religious development in the Tang and Song dynasties. It was not drawn on the events of the pilgrimage of Xuanzang 玄奘, as is generally believed in academic circles. The intrinsic principles contained within the images transcend their external features: the development of Esoteric Buddhism and the phenomenon of traveling monks in the periods and their fusion with Central Plains folk culture imbued the images with the influence of both exoteric and esoteric schools of Buddhism, together with folk beliefs; on the other hand, the creation of the “images of traveling Buddhist monks on pilgrimage for sutras with tame tigers” reflected “Ratnasambhava tathāgata beliefs,” which were prevalent in the Dunhuang region in the Tang and Song dynasties. Via metaphorical presentations of iconized monks, these images provided the expression of multiple religious beliefs.     

Religion,Politics and Liberation: A Dialogue between Gustavo Gutiérrez,the 14th Dalai Lama and Gianni Vattimo

Abstract

This paper explores the contributions to scholarship and to the globalized imagination concerning religion and politics by the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, the 14th Dalai Lama and the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. Their common theme of "liberation," personal and political through a common humanity, love and compassion, with or without God, deserves a very detailed examination. The three of them have made an enormous contribution to conversations on religion and politics centred on a human commonality as human beings, and to the practice of religion and politics centred on the poor, on the commandment of love and of service to the marginalized as a way of life and in a new era of hermeneutics and commonality. This paper argues that the practice of a religion of love and a compassionate politics stressing commonalities rather than differences have a lot to offer to a contemporary practice and critical reflection on political theology.     

Problematic Conjugations: Women’s Agency,Marriage and Domestic Violence in Indonesia

Abstract:

This paper examines women’s experience of domestic violence within marriage in Makassar, South Sulawesi. It analyses the meaning of marriage for men and women, the roles of men and women within marriage, shifts in marriage practices – particularly the shift from arranged to “love” marriage – and unequal gender positions within marriage. We discuss some salient issues in the “margins of marriage” in Indonesia: polygyny and constructions of masculinity that condone the practice of polygyny/affairs, and attitudes towards divorce, particularly for women. We then examine women’s perception of the causes and triggers of domestic violence as revealed by fieldwork data, using the lens of women’s agency. Our findings are that women perceive that their expressions of agency – for instance in challenging men’s authority, moral righteousness and adequacy as breadwinners – are the most common triggers for male violence within marriage. Finally, we discuss the difficulty for women of escaping domestic violence, thereby getting some purchase on the relative capacity of women to resist, deflect or deal with the violence.     

Lincoln's Reflective Patriotism

Abstract

In speech and deed, Lincoln's statesmanship manifests the possibility of an honorable, reasonable, and just love of country—that is, a reflective patriotism imbued by a republican love of liberty under God's Providence. In his speeches and writings, Lincoln consistently underscored that love of country must be governed by “reason,” “wisdom,” and “intelligence.” Thus, in his First Inaugural, March 4, 1861, he characteristically appealed to the combined forces of “Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land.” Lincoln's reflective patriotism was nurtured by his gratitude to the Founders and measured by his fidelity to a national Union dedicated to the universal moral principles of the Declaration under the particular rule of law established by the Constitution. Historically, it was articulated as an alternative to rival forms of allegiance that Lincoln opposed as both unjust and unreasonable during the Civil War era—namely, sectionalism, nativism, and the imperialism of Manifest Destiny. Each of these disordered forms of love threatened the inseparable moral and fraternal bonds of liberty and Union that Lincoln sought to perpetuate through an ordinate love of country guided by wisdom and critical self-awareness. Lincoln's Eulogy to Henry Clay, June 6, 1852 provides the most cogent expression of his reflective patriotism.