A Reevaluation of the Kesil’s Image in the Book of Qohelet

Abstract

During the early stages of its evolution, the book of Kings was a history narrative uninfluenced by Deuteronomy. Later, as the scroll ceased to express an interpretation of the past—that is to say, ceased to be a history narrative—it began to reflect a literary dialogue with Deuteronomy. At no point in time was Kings both Deuteronomistic and a history, and it was not, therefore, a component of Martin Noth’s hypothetical Deuteronomistic History. Rather, the pre-canonical scroll is best defined as an anthology, or “reader,” of fanciful stories about fallible nebi’im (prophets and kings) who find themselves in relationship with a fallible patron god. Ironically, because Kings was preserved as sacred literature, its god has been reconceptualized, against the plain sense of the text, as a reliable, just, and compassionate patron god.     

Reconciling State and Society? The Practice of the Common Good in the Partnership of Bishop David Sheppard and Archbishop Derek Worlock

The dynamic partnership between Anglican Bishop, David Sheppard, and his Roman Catholic counterpart, Derek Worlock, was a significant force in Liverpool during the 1980s, both ecumenically and politically. However, despite their “cult status” within the city, their national and international importance has yet to be explored. The 1981 Toxteth Riots are used as a case study through which to read their exceptional and transformative relationship. This article will discuss how their partnership became emblematic of changing church–state relationships from both Anglican and Roman Catholic perspectives, and how they each, in turn, went on to shape their churches’ dialogue with the government. The article explores the nature of their collaboration and the theological and doctrinal ideas that informed it, before going on to discuss the 1981 Riots in detail. It will demonstrate that the Sheppard–Worlock model of ecumenism put the Gospel, and in particular its focus upon the poor and marginalised, at the heart of their partnership. It will conclude that they sought the Common Good for society and believed that reconciliation was the key to the achievement of this goal.     

‘The realities of power’: David Stoll and the story of the 1982 Guatemalan genocide

ABSTRACT

In a short opinion piece published in late 2013, anthropologist David Stoll claimed that genocide did not occur in Guatemala under the military dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), that the charges against the former general and his subsequent conviction were unsubstantiated, and that human rights conditions for the country’s Indigenous peoples, including the Ixil population of northern Quiché department, actually improved under his government. By looking at the definition of protected groups under the United Nations Genocide Convention, and such basic notions as perpetrator motives and intent in international humanitarian law, this article will address Stoll’s latest contribution to a ‘counter-narrative by Guatemalans who perceive that their side of the story [was] left out’ of the 2013 genocide trial.     

‘Hanging out in Runescape’: Identity,Work and Leisure in the Virtual Playground

This article explores young people's practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities. Based on a three-year field-study of virtual worlds, it considers how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. The article discusses the relationship between the material and virtual aspects of young people's leisure. It suggests that the boundaries between these domains are porous. Virtual worlds offer spaces for the imagination and can enhance agency and, potentially, resistance. However, virtuality is no ‘liberated space’ and it incorporates norms and practices that often mirror those of the material world.     

“Dying out”: conversion and the complexity of neighbourliness on the Polish Belarussian border

This paper addresses the way that religious affiliation and conversion shape ongoing tensions over historical periods of exile, resettlement, exodus and elimination in a small town on the Eastern Polish border. I explore how local Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian’s negotiations of a troubled past are materialized and managed through narrating family histories of conversion, In particular, this paper focuses on the compromises that enable mixed faith marriages and the conflicts that emerge over the burial of religious converts. In these negotiations, members of both congregations deploy the local model of “neighbourliness” and the ideal of the borderlander, to greater and lesser success. Day-to-day the practice of considered neighbourliness helps local people to acknowledge and minimize religious and ethnic difference. However, conversion brings the realms of religion and relatedness into conjunction in a risky manner: marriage may offer an opportunity to enhance neighbourly connections, but burial is an event where the tensions over histories of conflict become apparent disrupting neighbourly relations and practices.     

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Notes Towards the “Big Book” of His Generation: Man Descending in the Sociopolitical Context of the 1960s and 1970s

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s historical novels starting with The Englishman’s Boy (1996) have been widely discussed and celebrated in academic books and journals, but his first collection of stories, Man Descending (1982), has been largely neglected by the academic critics. An examination of sociopolitical references, with a special focus on gender and masculinity, in a coherent group of these stories (“The Watcher,” “Drummer,” Cages,” “Man Descending,” and “Sam, Soren and Ed”), reveals a writerly personality that, while acutely sensitive to contemporary social and political developments, and itself deeply implicated in these trends, nevertheless stands uncomfortably apart from and assumes a critical attitude toward the prevailing, generally progressive, sociopolitical trends of the 1960s and 1970s. In the last story of Man Descending, the protagonist-narrator Ed emerges as an aspiring thirty-year-old author who has attempted, but could not finish, two novels of his society and times, and these early stories constitute Vanderhaeghe’s own notes toward a never fully realized “Big Book” of his generation of Saskatchewan men, born in the early 1950s, coming to young adulthood in the socially and politically transformative 1960s and 1970s, and surviving into an embattled early manhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time, as it is depicted in these stories, in which the aspirations of 1960s progressivism were hardening into a conformist sociopolitical orthodoxy.     

Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s

This study investigates the interaction of women's gendered identities and performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic premises as the inhabitant's space, where gender roles are formed and performed. Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women's identities and diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.     

The Book of Job – The Cyclical Progression of the Aporia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relation between aesthetics and theology in the Book of Job. The overall aim of the article is to explain the relationship between centre and periphery (poetry and prose) and its significance for the theology of the book. The article claims that Job's problem is not the attainment of wisdom but how to reconcile wisdom with suffering—how to relate to suffering. And this theological theme is propagated through aesthetics—including stylistic, narrative, compositional and structural features.

It is impossible to point out a preferential reading in the Book of Job because of the fundamental and structural dissonance of the text. This destabilized, ambiguous, paradoxical, ironical and dissonance-producing text is the hermeneutical starting point. Qua dissonance-producing text this feature is used as foundation for the interpretative task. And to get a comprehensive grip on the book two instruments are used: the literary and compositional means are analyzed, and the structural elements are evaluated in their relation between frame and centre. Following this line of interpretation reveals that the stylistic differences of the work manifest crucial theological distinctions. In the book of Job, shape and aesthetics are meaning and theology.     

“Buying out of the Matter”: Australia's Role in Restitution for Templer Property in Israel

A pietist, Lutheran group, the Templers settled in Palestine in the 1860s, but maintained their German citizenship and established the first Nazi Party branch outside of Germany. At the outbreak of World War II they were interned by the British in Palestine, and about one third were deported to Australia. In April 1948 the remaining Templers were evacuated and many also chose to settle in Australia. The Australian government, which wanted to use the proceeds from the sale of the Templers' property to assist in their resettlement, successfully persuaded Germany to include this restitution as part of the Claims Agreement signed in September 1952. It took a further decade of negotiation before a final settlement was agreed to.     

Empires of Sentiment; Intimacies from Death: David Livingstone and African Slavery ‘at the Heart of the Nation’

The article re-examines the death of David Livingstone. It highlights the importance of an outpouring of disinhibited emotion in 1874. Despite a shambolic funeral, a working-class underdog and an anti-slavery tradition were placed ‘at the heart of the nation’. Media coverage generated the experience of intimacy from sentimentalised versions of Livingstone's death and interactions with Africans, unleashing mass empathy, moral feeling and humanitarian impulse. It was crucial to the development of Britain's soft-power empire liberalism, inspiring a powerful network, aware of public opinion, to later intervene in eastern Africa. Thus the role of emotion and emotion capital should be factored more into the history of empire.     

Treasures of the Buddhist Monasteries in Gansu and Qinghai

AvisittoTibetanBuddhistmonasteriesinGansuandQinghaiProvincesimpressespeoplewiththeirmagnificenceandholiness.Eachcontainsculturalrelics,rangingfromofferingsonshrinestotheobjectsusedbytheLivingBuddhas.Theyareallofhistoricalvalueandalsoattreasuresrarelyfoundintheworld.RELICSOFGESAR.KingGesarwasahero,whosestoryhasbeentoldandretoldoverthecenturiesbypeopleintheTibetanareasinGansu,QinghaiandTibet.Hisbelongingsarealmostindispensableforvariousmonasteries.Forexample,intheDanaMonasteryinNangq…     

LGBTTs of Turkey between the east and the west – the city and the world through their eyes in the case of Izmir

The profession of city planning in Turkey does not consider groups such as LGBTTs (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transvestite (Cross-dressing)). This study aimed to draw attention to the need for Turkish city planning to consider LGBTT people by presenting the results of a survey conducted in Izmir, one of the leading cities in Turkey. The study examines the reasons that LGBTTs, as ordinary individuals in society, become closeted in the urban sphere and how city planning can overcome this challenging problem of a Muslim country that is between the East and the West and is a European Union (EU) nominee. To examine this delicate issue that has not previously been considered in urban/rural planning studies in Turkey, the main discussion first elaborates the nationwide conception of and attitude towards LGBTTs and a wide range of social and economic variables to assess the quality of LGBTTs’ urban living. Then, based on results of the survey, this study attempts to formulate how an inclusive city can be planned for all groups, including LGBTTs. The scope of this study covers the legal and social status of LGBTTs in Turkey, the overall profile of LGBTT survey respondents, these respondents’ place in Izmir and the specific characteristics of an LGBTT-inclusive city. The unique contribution of this study is that it is the first to examine LGBTT individuals’ demands from the city on the basis of their different socioeconomic profiles.