Johann Gaspar Spurzheim: The St. Paul of phrenology

ABSTRACT

Franz Joseph Gall’s wayward discipline Johann Gaspar Spurzheim greatly modified Gall’s original system and introduced it to the English-speaking world. Through an active program of itinerant lecturing, publishing and converting disciplines, Spurzheim made phrenology. He also developed a philosophy of following the laws of nature that was adopted and further promoted by his disciple, George Combe. Combe’s book The Constitution of Man (1828) became one of the best-selling works of its genre in the nineteenth century. Thus Spurzheim, never particularly original, exercised an enormous influence on nineteenth-century culture.     

Exploration of Basel Mission Company shipwreck remains at St George's Reef off Goa, West Coast of India: impact of the Basel Mission Co. on society and culture

A systematic exploration of shipwrecks has been carried out in Goa waters since 1997. Exploration off St George's Reef has brought to light the remains of a shipwreck at a depth of 15 m, containing various types of terracotta artefacts intended for house construction. Basel Mission Tile Works 1865' is impressed on bricks, roof and floor tiles. Study shows that the company was active in manufacturing terracotta and exported it to Africa, Australia, Borneo, Sumatra, and other countries. It has been renamed 'Comtrust', and is still producing terracotta using the same techniques. The impact of the Basel Mission Co. on society and culture is discussed. A study of finds of wrecks in the Mangalore and Calicut areas was undertaken.     

Poetic Theology: Paul and Form

ABSTRACT

The article offers a reading of the letters of Paul in relation to their interpretation by a number of figures – Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou. It traces the persistence of an economy of terms in Paul, in relation to the part and the whole, death and life, spirit and the flesh, and others, to argue that this economy morphs and transforms itself in the modern world, imparting and imposing a sociality of living and dying, a coercive distribution and withholding of violence in colonization, on a global scale. And this paper argues, at the same time, that the economy of terms Paul’s letters advance is interrupted, that it comes undone, and that, in this coming undone, the theological becomes poetic – that the letters if Paul teach us to read what may be called “poetic theology.”     

Citizen Paul

In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul twice evokes his rights as a Roman citizen. When he crosses from the jurisdiction of the Jewish to that of the Roman court, Paul in effect completes his definitive mapping of Jewish law as a local affair whose peculiar practices must be subsumed and refigured by the universal order promised by the Messiah to all nations. Paul's real and epistolary journeys to Rome effect a symbolic translation westward of Jewish civic themes, linking the destiny of the Jews to the European political tradition. Yet Paul does so by evacuating the central mark of membership in Israel, namely the covenant of circumcision, of its continued validity. Rather than either salvaging Paul's universalism as the basis of modern democracy or critiquing his cultural politics, I use the concept of citizenship to begin calculating the consequences of Paul's multiple memberships in three distinct juridical orders: the Hellenistic city‐state, the nation of Israel, and the Roman Empire. My goal is not to re‐localize or de‐legitimate Paul's universalism in the name of individual cultures, but rather to recall the integral dream of universalism to its dialogue with diverse citizenship protocols, including Jewish ones, as well as to disclose the universal dimension of seemingly local civic rituals and routines.     

英国“围观帝”

“这个肥胖半秃的男人到底是谁？”过去一年中,英国电视观众都在问这个问题。 长期以来,我们已经习惯在电视上看到同样的形象——西装笔挺、皮鞋锃亮、头发纹丝不乱、嘴角泛起的笑容弧度恰到好处。     

St Odo's St Martin: the uses of a model

The ideal of sanctity presented in Sulpicius Severus' Vita Martini included a repudiation of military life. Sulpicius was concerned to show that Martin was a true ‘man of power’ (potens), but this had nothing to do with the army. On the contrary, in Sulpicius' day, the potens was, in the political sphere, a decidedly civilian patron; in the religious sphere he was a miracle-worker. Six hundred years later the attributes of power were no longer the same. Social and political changes had worked to transform the ‘man of power’ into a warrior. The old ideal remained, however; its reactionary effects were evident in several Cluniac texts, where exemplary men were shown leaving the tumult of the battlefield for the discipline of the monastery. Yet within that same tenth-century Clumiac milieu an entirely different pattern of sointhood, that of the holy warrior, was created by St Odo, the second abbot of Cluny. It was a model quite unprecedented in the West, but it was not created new out of whole cloth. Rather, this new persona was patterned on the same old form. Its explanation seems to lay precisely in Odo's literal adherence to the old paradigm, but understood in the light of the changes which had taken place in the role of the potens.