Solidarity as Spiritual Exercise: Accompanying Migrants at the US/Mexico Border

Abstract

This essay seeks to articulate a practical understanding of Christian solidarity as spiritual exercise that is based on Jon Sobrino's theological insights, uniquely grounded in his formation in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and his particular witness to the martyrs of El Salvador. We then turn to an exploration of the Kino Border Initiative, a binational ministry of sociopastoral accompaniment, educational outreach, research and advocacy as an institutional attempt to pursue a praxis of solidarity.     

初论人性时空场

在缜密论述了人地关系中人性时空场基本概念和特征的基础上,从人性时空场意识流与人地关系的相互作用的角度认知了人性时空场的科学哲学内涵。最后分析了人性时空场意识流的随机变化特点之表达。提出:随着行为地理学研究深入,人性时空场意识流将成为它新的研究对象;与此同时,本文首次导出潜意识地理学(Potential Sense Geography)的学科概念,认为潜意识地理学会弥补行为地理学的不足,它将发挥人文关怀的当代学科优势,继而为人性的完善和人的可持续发展及人地关系的根本和谐作出贡献。     

The culture of reconstruction,European literature,thought and film, 1945–1950

John Trenchard's and Thomas Gordon's ‘Cato’ has generally been seen by historians as the embodiment of neo-Harringtonianism and the polar opposite of Bernard Mandeville's thought. This paper addresses that misreading and places Trenchard and Gordon within a tradition of liberal republican political thought, rather than a civic humanist or neo-roman tradition. It examines the relationship between the political, philosophical and religious beliefs of Trenchard and Gordon and those of Mandeville, arguing that they shared a common framework with respect to the problems of politics.     

瓜亚基尔会谈再认识

玻利瓦尔与圣马丁的瓜亚基尔会谈,虽然在某些问题上存在过分歧,但也有意见一致的地方;经过磋商,彼此达成了谅解。这次会谈并没有失败,而是取得了积极的结果。     

THE REVEREND BAYES VS. JESUS CHRIST

The Bayesian perspective on historiography is commonsensical: If historiography is not certain like a priori knowledge or sense data, and it is not fiction, historiography is probable. Richard Carrier's book argues for a Bayesian, probabilistic interpretation of historiography in general and of the debate about the historicity of Jesus in particular. Jesus can be interpreted as a historically transmitted reference of “Jesus,” as a bundle of properties, or literally. Carrier devotes too much energy to debating literalism that confuses evidence with hypotheses. But evidence preserves information to different degrees; it is true or not. Carrier proposes to apply objective, frequentist Bayesianism in historiography despite the difficulties in assigning values. He argues that ranges of values can determine historiographical hypotheses. Carrier does not analyze in Bayesian terms the main method for Bayesian determination of posterior probabilities in historiography: inference from multiple independent sources. When the prior probability of a hypothesis is low, but at least two independent evidential sources, such as testimonies, support it, however unreliable each of the testimonies is, the posterior probability leaps. The problem with the Synoptic Gospels as evidence for a historical Jesus from a Bayesian perspective is that the evidence that coheres does not seem to be independent, whereas the evidence that is independent does not seem to cohere. Carrier's explanation of some the evidence in the Gospels is fascinating as the first Bayesian reconstruction of structuralism and mimesis. Historians attempted to use theories about the transmission and preservation of information to find more reliable parts of the Gospels, parts that are more likely to have preserved older information. Carrier is too dismissive of such methods because he is focused on hypotheses about the historical Jesus rather than on the best explanations of the evidence. I leave open questions about the degree of scholarly consensus and the possible reasons for it.     

Feature Reviews

Abstract

Liberal education has a real, if precarious, place in America. Its purpose is to remind each of us that were all more than middle-class, more than beings with interests or rights. American liberal education finds its resources in classical and Christian thought, both European and indigenous. The main challenge to liberal education today comes from the libertarians.     

Holy Organ or Unholy Idol? Forming a History of the Sacred Heart in New Spain

In the eighteenth century, Novohispanic painters produced some of the most innovative and visually complex images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. While they are based in part on European printed frontispieces of books about Christ's heart, the paintings are not mere copies or derivatives of European artworks. This article explores the reasons for the particular pictorial strategies of Novohispanic paintings of the Sacred Heart. I argue that the visual strategies employed by Novohispanic artists were intended to argue in support of the legitimacy and historicity of the cult of the Sacred Heart; the cult was under attack in the eighteenth century for, among other reasons, being too new and thus lacking historical roots, making it potentially heretical and apocryphal. Novohispanic depictions, like religious texts produced to defend the Sacred Heart, champion the cult, thereby attempting to shape perception through the power of the images.     

The agrarian history of Byzantium,from the origins to the twelfth century. The sources and problems

The relationship between conquerors and conquered in the Latin Empire of Constantinople has traditionally been understood as a relentlessly hostile one, particularly on the religious level. Whatever its merits, the dominance of this view has sometimes resulted in the gross misinterpretation of important pieces of evidence. This article examines two unusual liturgical texts that were treated by their discoverers as products of a Latin campaign of liturgical proselytism. The texts themselves are bilingual presentations of the Western rite of mass, with Greek and Latin text presented in an interlinear format. Most unusually, the Latin text is written in Greek characters. This article makes the case, due to internal evidence as well as the broader context of ecclesiastical relations in the Latin Empire, that these texts were created by Greek clerics rather than by Latin authorities, and that their purpose was entirely different from that imagined by their discoverers.     

Seventeenth-Century Glass Trade Beads from La Salle's Fort St. Louis and the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia

Abstract

Glass trade beads are described here from two seventeenth-century sites located in the upper Illinois Valley, La Salle's 1682–1691 Fort St. Louis and the nearby Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, destroyed during an Iroquois raid in 1680. Simple monochrome drawn beads characterize both bead assemblages and each contains significant percentages of very small (<2 mm) and small (2–4 mm) size beads. Dominant colors are blue, white, and black. Turquoise-blue beads were a staple of the French trade at this time in the Illinois Country, particularly in transactions involving La Salle and his successors based at Fort St. Louis. Comparative treatment provided as part of this research indicates that there are significant similarities between the bead assemblage from Fort St. Louis and the beads recovered from the 1686 wreck of La Salle's ship Belle in Matagorda Bay off the Texas coast.     

The mosaic of the crypt of St. Nicholas in Bari (Italy): integrated GPR and laboratory diagnostic study

The crypt of St. Nicholas in Bari, Southern Italy, is a building of cultural worldwide importance. Inside the crypt a mosaic develops on the apsidal floor and along a parietal seat placed along the apsidal masonry, in the form of cladding. A surviving portion of the mosaic pavement is also preserved in the right lateral chapel. Integrated non-destructive survey and laboratory analyses were undertaken for the diagnostic study of the mosaic. GPR prospection was successfully applied to the study of its conservation state, that is strictly related to the condition of the subsoil, in particular to the presence and distribution of water. The presence of water, whose rise interests also some portions of the masonry and water content distribution were identified by the results of electromagnetic wave velocity analysis in GPR data.     

殷都安阳兴衰的地理因素探析

殷都安阳的兴起和发展与安阳一带相对优越的自然环境和农业、交通、人口、历史文化基础等地理因素有着较为密切的关系。商晚期以后,安阳的衰落与安阳一带的自然环境趋于恶化,政治中心转移,经济衰退及军事防守方面的缺陷和漕运不便等地理因素有关。