Nietzsche's Political Critique of Modern Science

Abstract

Contrary to the claims that The Brothers Karamazov is a polyphonic novel, in which the author's own views are irrelevant to its interpretation, and that Dostoevsky himself was unable to furnish an adequate defense of Christianity after Book V, the author shows how Zossima's doctrines of active love and responsibility for all are the interpretive keys to the novel. This so-called “unity in diversity” in Bakhtin's literary criticism thereby provide a compelling alternative vision of community from the Grand Inquisitor's.     

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.     

From Revolution to Dissolution: The Quai d'Orsay,the Banque Russo-Asiatique,and the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1917–1926

This article explores the use made of Christianity during the Second World War and the dilemmas created for the Allies by Stalin's religious record. It is particularly concerned with the way in which Christianity appeared for a while to become a bridge between East and West, with the explicit promise of continued post-war co-operation. However, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Anglo-American policies in particular switched from using Christianity to rehabilitate the adverse image of the Soviet regime to what had been the inter-war policy of using religion to demonise it. Inter-war demonisation held up the Soviet Union as a model not to be emulated. Post-war demonisation pointed to the Soviet Union as an expansionist threat bent on world domination. The article examines Stalin's responses, and Allied perceptions of those responses, to the changes in Western religious policy and propaganda from the Second World War to the emergence of the cold war. The article seeks to show how both sides used religion for political purposes, but that in the final analysis Western reluctance to relinquish what was perhaps its most emotive means of indicting and containing Communism meant that Christianity, instead of becoming a bridge, became a divisive factor that contributed to both the onset of the cold war and public acceptance of it.     

Ethnographic sound collections and Australian Aboriginal Heritage: Kaytetye song traditions remembered

ABSTRACT

Song was one of the principal methods of transmitting knowledge in the fundamentally oral societies of Indigenous Australia. As the breadth of song traditions has greatly diminished over the past 200 years, archival recordings of song now form a significant resource of intangible cultural heritage for Australia’s Indigenous people. The song performances recorded in the past are now being rediscovered, remembered and in some cases revived. This paper presents findings from a recent project involving the return of a set of poorly documented recordings of songs to Kaytetye people in central Australia. These newly discovered recordings, the earliest ever made of Kaytetye singing, are shown to be an important heritage resource for these communities. Working collaboratively with senior song experts in order to gain a better understanding of the meaning and cultural significance of various songs, I document the how this discussion of audio material generated important social-histories and memories, reinforced local understandings of rights in cultural heritage, and revealed both continuities and changes in Kaytetye ceremonial and song practice.     

英语语言学习与西方文化影响

语言与文化是相互依存的关系,文化对语言学习的影响重大,在英语学习过程中应注意对文化渊源的了解。语言和文化有着不可分割的关系,对语言学习而言,文化意识至关重要。古希腊神话和基督教思想是西方文明的源头,深刻影响着西方文明的发展。作为语言艺术的西方文学反映和代表着西方文化。所以,了解西方文化,广泛涉猎英美文学作品,对英语学习者是十分必要的。     

Letting Indigenous People Talk About Their Country: a Case Study of Cross‐Cultural (Mis)communication in an Environmental Management Planning Process

This paper presents a case study, based on the experiences of two senior Aboriginal traditional owners who were engaged in negotiations surrounding the establishment of a Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) in southeast Queensland. This case is notable as an illustration of the capacity of natural resource management planning, through negotiation within a formal process, to extinguish native title. Importantly, the personal experiences of two senior Aboriginal people provide an insight into a situation designed to enhance interactions between government and community, with the overt intention of improving natural resource management. However, the record of this personal experience indicates that the communication was less than satisfactory and that the outcomes, at least in terms of the experiences recorded here, of the individual senior Aboriginal community members, was less than satisfactory. We conclude that, despite best intentions, there is an important lack of provision for community influence or power, including any legal or administrative institutional framework. We also conclude that there are important institutional and social processes of engagement still to be developed, including ways of engaging the community more widely that has conventionally been the case.     

The Green Frog and Desalination: A Nyungar Metaphor for the (Mis‐)Management of Water Resources,Swan Coastal Plain,Western Australia

ABSTRACT In common with Aboriginal groups around Australia, the indigenous people, or Nyungars, of Perth adopt a holistic attitude towards groundwater resources. Of cultural significance are lakes, springs, soaks and watercourses that feature in Dreamtime creation narratives. Perth is experiencing major water shortages and many Nyungars feel that the degradation of the freshwater supply is a result of mismanagement and unsustainable development by non‐Aboriginal people. Proposals for dealing with the issue are seen as equally out of balance with the natural order of things. Water regulators have much to learn from indigenous Australians about water and environmental management. Although water continues to be central to Nyungar identity, the study on which this article is based found evidence of attenuated knowledge about the Dreaming, with discontinuities evident in the way significance is increasingly being read in everyplace rather than in specific ‘story places’.     

Heroic History and Chiefly Chapels in 19th Century Tahiti

ABSTRACT This article seeks to understand mass conversion to Christianity in early 19th century Tahiti as the re‐materialisation of a heroic social field. Beginning with a re‐consideration of Sahlins' notion of ‘heroic history’, I argue that heroic Tahitian history was a distinctive combination of chiefly and collective action. The cultural structure of this history was reflected in three architectural moments: the building of a chapel for the high chief, Pomare, at Mo'orea, the generalised replication of this act through the construction, within a very short period, of some 70 chapels at Tahiti, and the building of a monumental chapel for Pomare at Tahiti. This article is a ‘prequel’ to an earlier publication on mass conversion to Christianity and church construction in Rarotonga.     

镇江“大兴国寺记碑”研究

《至顺镇江志》中所载"大兴国寺记碑"为研究基督教在元代中国的传播提供了第一手资料,对于研究基督教(景教)的教义、景教在江浙地区的流传、景教在元代的兴衰、元政府对景教的政策、景教与佛道等教的关系至为重要。