The Postmodern Problem

Abstract

Mormon political theology must reconcile two distinct projects: the care for the Church's concrete, temporal existence in the World, and the welcoming of the future Kingdom of God on earth. Because of this duality, political theology finds itself highlighting the distinction between the World and the Kingdom of God and at the same time pointing out common ground and attempting to establish peace between the Church and the World. The alleged contradictions of Mormon political thought are, according to this conception, to be understood not as confrontations between idealism and brute reality (or “utopianism” and “assimilation”), but rather as the bringing together of the two goals of Mormon political reflection, pursued by two sides of political theology. These two sides, apologetic and prophetic political theology, are distinguished not by their political content, but rather by their particular kinds of political rhetoric.     

CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF ISOLATION SYSTEMS FOR BRIDGE STRUCTURES

Abstract

In the first part of this paper the objectives of an isolation system for a bridge structure are discussed, in relation to modelling options and modification of the traditional capacity design principles. A displacement-based design approach is then presented, using a linear equivalent single degree-of-freedom model. The preliminary design of an isolation system for existing bridges is based on the definition of a “structure regularity” which allows the estimation of whether the response of the real structure will be similar to that predicted in the preliminary design phase. The efficiency of the approach is shown in designing the isolation system for a highly irregular bridge.     

Planning Culture—A Concept to Explain the Evolution of Planning Policies and Processes in Europe?

Abstract

This article examines the complex relations between spatial planning and its cultural context (including the specific socio-economic patterns and related cultural norms, values, traditions and attitudes). To be able to analyze the extent to which spatial planning adapts to external pressures such as Europeanization, a “culturized planning model” with the three dimensions “planning artefacts”, “planning environment” and “societal environment” is used. It can be observed that the “harmonization” of spatial planning practices can result from external pressures such as EU regulations as well as (horizontal) collective learning processes. However, “harmonization” does not necessarily result in convergence. Adaptational pressures such as Europeanization often result in the customization of existing structures, frames and policies (“planning artefacts” and “planning environment”) but do not fundamentally change the underlying core cultural traits (“societal environment”). These cultural traits are quite resistant to change and help maintain a diversity of planning cultures and policies in Europe.     

DAVID AS A BIBLICAL ‘GOOD-FELLA’ AND ‘THE GODFATHER’

Abstract

Scholars search for analogies with which to better understand biblical texts. David has been compared to the “outlaw”, “refugee”, “vassal”, “renegade”, “guerrilla”, “bandit chief”, “fugitive” and “fugitive hero”. This article suggest that there are better cultural-social analogies, i.e., David as a “goodfellan”while in exile from Saul and in the land of the Philistines, and upon accession to the throne, “The Godfather”.

This article also has, as a part of its purpose, the intent to unmask some of the behavior of David and of monarchy for what they are: essentially organized crime maintained in large part by the use of indiscriminate violence-supported by nonsensical myths and obvious hypocrisy.

Cross-cultural comparisons are made throughout between the David stories, gangster movies and systems of monarchy—especially the ad hoc feudal type. Historical questions aside: The David stories can be “cross-culturally” compared with gangster films as “art”.     

The greatest deception: fiction,falsity and manifestation in Spinoza’s Metaphysical Thoughts

ABSTRACT

“The first meaning of true and false”, writes Spinoza in a neglected passage of the Metaphysical Thoughts, “seems to have had its origin in stories”. Ideas are true when they “show” us things as they are; they are false when they do not, when they are fictional. In this essay, I argue that what appears at first sight to be a simple assertion of a correspondence theory of truth in fact opens onto broad historical transformations in the nature of meaning that reshaped the very atmosphere of truth: the emergence of a new kind of fictionality, transformations in the sense of logical interpretation, and ultimately transformations in the structures and sources of the natural light, that “clarity” which constitutes for Spinoza, as for Descartes, an indispensable criterion for certainty.     

Miroslav Volf on Living One’s Faith

Abstract

In this essay the author reflects on Miroslav Volf’s discussion, in A Public Faith, of Christianity as properly a prophetic religion. The author focuses especially on the two main malfunctions that Volf cites as accounting for the fact that the faith of individual Christians is often not prophetic, namely, what he calls “idleness of faith” and what he calls “coerciveness of faith.”     

Fors and Forte in Vergil and the Problem of A. 1. 377

The author looks at Vergil’s treatment of fors and forte and finds that forte sua at A. 1. 377 is not only exceptional, but most probably a corruption not least due to forte being used in the previous sentence. He conjectures instead sorte sua “due to its (namely the storm’s) own (special and arbitrary) law”.     

From the Editor

ABSTRACT

The “Orange Wave” in the 2011 federal election produced the largest and most diverse federal NDP caucus in Canadian history. This article uses interviews with members of this caucus to study their legislative experiences. It finds that a shared commitment to creating social democratic change generated an overarching similarity in the experiences of these MPs across sociodemographic groups. NDP MPs that were young, visible minorities, and from Quebec were not found to have significantly different legislative experiences when compared to the NDP MPs not from those groups. Female NDP MPs did report different legislative experiences compared to male NDP MPs, but these differences were limited and more present among younger female NDP MPs. The conclusion argues that ideology shapes legislative experiences, interviewing method affects the results of legislative experiences studies, the intersectionality of MPs’ identities could be important, and gathering large cross-party interview samples of Canadian MPs is a challenge.     

China’s urban ideology: new towns,creation cities,and contested landscapes of memory

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that “the urban” has emerged as the most significant ideological realm in contemporary China. In developing this argument, I suggest an alternative approach to how we theorize urbanization in China. Seeking to avoid the dichotomized analyses that often characterize scholarship on China’s urbanization, the paper suggests reading “the urban” as an ideological device. Such a reading calls for an analytical distinction between the city as a technology of socialist party-state planning and government and urbanization as a messy social process over which the state struggles for control. It also calls for a recognition of the ways that ideology itself has shifted dramatically in China, from the Mao-era centrality and coherence of class struggle and its overriding goal of proletarianization to a much less coherent post-reform message of “stability”. The paper begins with a brief discussion of ideology and Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” in a Chinese register. It then considers the film 24 City, directed by Jia Zhangke, as a template for understanding urban spaces as sites of conflict between the city as an ideological device and urbanization as a social process. New urban spaces are then explored in an effort to tease out their complex and contradictory ideological renderings. I conclude with an argument about the openness and contradictions of China’s urban spaces and how an ideological analysis can resist the kind of theoretical closure that much work on urbanization in China seems to aim for.     

The Senzai Maru's visit to Shanghai and its understanding of China

ABSTRACT

The significance of the Senzai Maru’s 1862 journey to Shanghai was great. From this opportunity, Japan not only learned from its neighbor the danger of closing off one’s borders and refusing to change, but also the importance of expanding its horizons and “learning from the world.” From these lessons, Japan transitioned from “expelling barbarians” toward “enlightenment,” from conservative to “reformist.” After successfully overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan’s Meiji reforms thrived.     

Solomon and His Empire: Fact or Fiction?

Abstract

The essay examines the plausibility of a “Double Monachy,” a large state, under a king Solomon in the 10th century with Jerusalem as its capital. First, all texts in the Old Testament are mentioned, and it is pointed out that no extrabiblical texts from the period mention such a state. In the next paragraph the archaeological finds from the period are examined whether they may allow the existence of such a state, and it is concluded that it is improbable. Also from historical knowledge of the period in the Levant as well as Solomon’s name it is concluded that there was not a large kingdom in Jerusalem under a king of that name.

In the rest of the essay I try, from the story in the Bible, to date the various elements of the story, and comparing them with other legendary kings (e.g. Sargon of Akkad) to find a suitable period when such a legend could be construed, I point to the second half of the 7th cent. BCE as the best possibility for the story’s date.     

Rethinking the Creation of North Norway as a Region

Abstract

The subject of this article is the creation of North Norway from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Some initial remarks about the relationship between nations and regions are followed by a number of interpretations of recent national and nationalism debates. The former synthesis of the creation of North Norway as a region is analysed, using approaches that on the one hand could be described as an actor stage theory, and on the other as structurally modernistic. As an alternative, a new theoretical approach inspired by cultural hegemonic theories is presented. This cultural hegemonic approach uses the works of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) as a point of departure and is related to the concepts he developed, such as “hegemony”, “counter-hegemony”, “historic bloc”, “civil society” and “organic intellectuals”. A new synthesis of the historical regional formation process, based on a cultural hegemonic approach, is then presented, showing that North Norway as a region is the result of a long-lasting, contradictory and continuous process. Six periods are identified in the creation of the region: the period from the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century up to the second decade of the twentieth century emerges as a time-frame for a counter-hegemonic nation-building project. Since then, North Norway as a region has developed through hegemonic struggle between different kinds of region- and nation-building projects within and outside the region.     

This Is Not an Improvisation: Letitia Landon and the Slipperiness of Taxonomy

ABSTRACT

Writing in 2007, in The Wordsworth Circle, Jeffrey Robinson remarked on the “ephemerality” of improvisational poetry, its fundamental resistance to being “preserved.” Printed poetry is typically regarded as “fixed” and static: what any poem represents as improvisation is, at best, only a record, executed in a fixed medium, of a performance whose infinite variability is inherent in the nature of improvisation itself. Partly an homage to Rene Magritte’s This is Not a Pipe (1928–29) and to Michel Foucault’s 1973 essay on that painting, and using as a test case The Improvisatrice (1825), the long poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, herself a devotee of interdisciplinary and multimedia performance, this essay considers the physical, structural, and methodological challenges and limitations posed to printed “word art” by works that purport to be, or aspire to the condition of, “improvisations.” The improvisatrice who is the poem’s narrator claims to be both a painter and a songstress, but her “speech,” captured and rendered in printed words by Landon (who ventriloquizes that speech), can neither “be” nor even “represent” a work produced (“performed”) in visual art or vocal song. In her long poem Landon effectively creates a literary trompe l’oeil, an illusion that depends for its “completion” upon the reader’s implied participation in that performative act of completion. In the process, Landon’s poem reveals the fundamental incompatibility of improvisational literary production with the performative nature of improvisation.     

Your Mother was a Hittite and Your Father an Amorite: Ethnicity,Judaism and Palestine's Cultural Heritage

ABSTRACT

The article argues, in continuation of previous contri-butions by the author, that “Judaism”/”Jews” are from the outset ideological and religious constructs rather than ethnic entities. As-syrian Judáa and Persian Yehud were geographical and political designations limited to the Southern highland of Palestine and it is unlikely that the extensive references to yehudim known from the Hellenistic period onwards should in all cases cover people origi-nating from that particular area. The origins of Judaism should not be sought in any invariable ethnic quality of the various populations of Palestine in antiquity but in the influence and shaping of reli-gious ideologies with the holy city of Jerusalem as a strong and cen-tral symbol.